Zarathustra and the Children of Abraham
James
Luchte
Contents
Zarathustra’s Nietzsche: From
Guilt to Innocence
The Death of God: The Seeds of Its
Own Destruction
Novelty under the Sun: Two Notions
of the Will and Will to Power
Overman: Beyond Dionysus and
Apollo in Tragedy and Comedy
Revaluation of All Values: The
Lifeworld of the Overman
Zarathustra’s Children
Despite the fact that Nietzsche and his
family considered his magnum opus to
be blasphemous, and feared a backlash from the religious establishment, Thus Spoke Zarathustra was not banned.[1] Indeed, not much notice was taken of it until
well after Nietzsche’s collapse.[2] In our era, this idiosyncratic work seems to
stand in a paradoxical place, all its own.
On the one hand, it is a work that is very well known and referenced
with respect to some of its most famous phrases and words, such as ‘God is
dead’, the ‘Last Man’, ‘Overman’ and ‘eternal recurrence of the same.’ On the other hand, it is a work that is
little studied, either in literary, theological or philosophical contexts. The present essay seeks to redress this
neglect by building on the efforts of those, such as Lampert, Higgins, and others,
who have sought to engage Thus Spoke
Zarathustra as a serious philosophical work. In the present context, I will pursue this
engagement through an examination of the relationship between Nietzsche and the
religions which trace their genealogy to Abraham in the Torah. Such a focus will allow an intersection of
literary, theological and philosophical perspectives in a broader
interpretation of the significance of Thus
Spoke Zarathustra as a challenge to traditional religious orthodoxy.
It could be suggested that Nietzsche appropriates the name
of Zarathustra in a vain
attempt to subvert and go beyond
Zoroaster, the inventor of good and
evil.[3] This attempt is vain, in a mocking
challenge to the philosopher of Ecclesiastes,
as it asserts that there is something new under the sun, or at least
that this something – novelty - is at least possible –
beyond a metaphysics of an eschaton.
For Nietzsche, the eschaton unfolds as a self-same suppression of Life,
as the latest eradication of the moment of becoming. In this way, Nietzsche will not only risk
this vanity in an attempt to think differently,[4]
but will also affirm the possibility of a transfigured existence of radical
innocence. It is an affirmation of
innocence which displaces a disciplinary regime of radical guilt. Across the following pages, I would like to
lay out the intimations in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra of a
pathway from a regime of guilt to a topos[5]
for an innocence of becoming.
As an example of a novel transgression of the monotheistic
orthodoxy, and as a guide for our interpretation, Zarathustra evokes a new
truth (given in his dream by Apollo) that a deeper, hidden bind ties life
together (the Dionysian). In response to
the common currency of ‘truth’ as either the mere systemization, of clarity and
distinctness, or the truth of the revealed religions, Zarathustra sings in ‘The
Other Dancing Song”,
One!
Oh man, take care!
Two!
What does the deep
midnight declare!
Three!
I was asleep ---
Four!
From a deep dream I
woke and swear:
Five!
The world is deep,
Six!
Deeper than day had
been aware.
Seven!
Deep is its woe;
Eight!
Joy --- deeper yet
than agony:
Nine!
Woe implores: Go!
Ten!
But all joy wants
eternity ---
Eleven!
Wants deep, wants deep
eternity.
Twelve![6]
This is an instance of one of Zarathustra’s many
evocations and gestures of reversal and revaluation: that the ‘unity’ of
existence – if there is to be such a ‘unity’ – must be intimated in the hidden
recesses of life. Such an excavation and
conjuring of the depths is not greatly served by either a systematic
interrogation and logical analysis, or the dogmas of revealed monotheism. The depths when brought to the surface become
disfigured by the procedure of disclosure, by the production of the theoretical
object of analysis. In other words, the
intimacy of the singular and its self-interpretation and expression is
displaced by the regime of subsumption of the particular by the universal. And, we find this logical procedure mirrored
in the theistic devaluation not only of the depths as obscure, evil, but also
of life and embodied existence. Or, for
those with “listening eyes”[7],
the inventor of new values or the revolution which comes on the wings of a dove
is effectively silenced by the hegemonic discourses of Reason (science) and
Faith (revealed religion), due to the very grammar of their expression. Intimate, indigenous, expression is
displaced, crowded out by “realist” information, constructed facts,
propositions, noise. For Nietzsche, on
the contrary, the most difficult task is the attempt to go under into
the depths. If truth loves to hide, we
would destroy her if we forced her to stand naked in the panopticon[8]
of our inspection regime. If we do
indeed love the truth, we must travel into the hidden – forbidden - so as to
find her there – in her truth. She
must speak for herself.
For Nietzsche, and later for Bataille[9]
and Iriguray,[10]
it is poetry, music and ‘detours’ which facilitate a descent into the depths,
giving glimpses of truth in her own domain.
It is poetry which can go under into the depths, and it is thus
poetry which will be the hidden tie that binds together the ‘unity’ of
Nietzsche’s attempt to go
under, into the depths. Poetry attempts
to bring truth into the Open without turning her into ashes, or as a lacerated
corpse. With the implosion of the
antithetical regime of consciousness and existence, of subject and object, of
concept and intuition (and of God and Creation), we find that poetry, even if
conceived as a type of conceptuality, is, for Nietzsche, a self-expression of
the phenomenon of life.[11] It is an evocation from the depths, from the
nether realms into the marriage of light and darkness. It is the in-between and root of a radical
imagination, of language, of a surreal temporality. Poetry
intimates, for Nietzsche, chaos at this heart of existence, its expression
seeks to give birth to a dancing star – it is this giving
birth. The poets were removed from the
Light of the polis in that they
implored the people to remember the song of the earth resonating below
the regimentation of the polis. Plato charged that poets lie too much
– that they spoke in ways which made the true false and the false true – that
poetry itself was merely the idle chatter of the ephemeral realm, a logos of untruth. However, Nietzsche reminds Plato in the
Preface to Beyond Good and Evil that his attempt to create a ‘Good in
itself’ would be a self-negating attempt to deny perspective, to refuse
Life – in other words, that his lust for an Otherworld is a weary attempt of
escape, of nihilism. Zarathustra laughs,
agreeing that the poets do lie too much – but he tells the troubled youth on
the mountainside, “Zarathustra too is a poet.”[12] It is perhaps in his use of poetry, of an
art, a lie, which is uniquely suited to tell the truth, that Nietzsche’s
challenge to philosophy and theology is at its most subversive. For, not only does he throw off the protocols
of science and logic, but writing in a style that resembles each of the three
monotheistic texts, Nietzsche not only intimates the all to human creative root
of each of the texts, but also sets forth an alternative teaching of its own, a
doctrine which seeks, by returning to the roots of the trajectory of our own
era in Zarathustra and Abraham, to counsel human being in their self-overcoming
of the monotheistic genealogy.
Taking seriously Nietzsche’s
“choice” of Zarathustra, the following pages will be oriented by the tapestry
of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a poetic topos for Nietzsche’s philosophy.
I will begin in section one, Zarathustra and Abraham: The Destination
of the One, with an exploration of the originary event and milieu of the
regime of guilt, of nihilism and the Last Man.
I will disclose the relationship of the Zoroastrian telos of the One and
the assertion, in Genesis, of the one god by Abraham. Continuing this discussion, I will show, in The
Death of God: The Seeds of Its Own Destruction that the violent origin of
monotheism and later of the Christian virtue of ‘truth” will disseminate a
repetition of a violent origin to which one is held hostage, condemned to
surrender to this serial logic of self-destruction. Amidst this impasse and apocalypse, I will
lay out, in Novelty under the Sun: Two Notions of the Will and Will to Power
a scenario of creation and affirmation of novelty divested of nostalgia and
nihilism, of a will to power oriented toward the future and toward the
transfigured possibilities of life. The
One God dies in that he is exposed as one will to power among many, his claim
to ultimate truth is an eradication of all novelty under the sun,
of any new truth and new value erupting amidst this play of
Life. I will next attempt to sketch the
event of such a will to power in Overman: Beyond Dionysus and Apollo in
Tragedy and Comedy in which I will contend not only that the poetic topoi
of Ancient Greek tragedy and comedy are only a beginning in an understanding of
Dionysian existence and but also that Nietzsche’s vision of the Overman
transcends the pessimistic individualism of the tragic age of the Greeks. In Eternal Recurrence of the Same: The
Affirmation of the Overman, I will explore the meaning of the eternal
return and of the affirmation of amor fati in the context of a singular
affirmation of existence. In light of
the affirmation of the eternal return, I will consider the morphos of the Overman
amidst his event of creation in Revaluation of All Values: The Lifeworld of
the Overman. I will close with an exploration
of the radical implications of the sacred affirmation of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra in Zarathustra’s Children.
Zarathustra and Abraham: The Destination of the One
The historical Zarathustra, or that personage of whom
we attempt to catch a glimpse as a historical figure, stands at the beginning
of a long line of quite familiar religious assertions. Zarathustra is reputed to be the “first” to
not only posit the distinction betwixt good and evil, but also to describe the
creation, cosmogony, of the world as a moral event. The specific horizons of his assertion, and
of his remembrance of an originary unity, describe a world constituted
by not only by an “ethical”, but also a “metaphysical” opposition of differing
principles of existence. It is the regime
of good and evil that constitutes the ultimate reality and raison d’etre
of the world. However, such an assertion
is not merely an endless Heraclitean opposition – or a happy marriage. For Zarathustra, or Zoroaster as he is
likewise known (and still finds hundreds of thousands of supporters to this
day), the specific metaphysical opposition is not stagnant. It is a war of attrition, but, with a
difference. This battle between good and
evil is not the battleground of Metaphysics, conceived by Kant as the queen of
the sciences in his Critique of Pure Reason. For Zoroaster, on the contrary, amid the heat
of battle, ground, territory, is gained and lost.[13] Yet, this war comprised of many battles must
exhibit a singular destiny. This ethical
battle possesses a trajectory which seeks to, and necessarily so, transcend any
metaphysical entanglement. The destiny
of his war exhibits an irreversible trajectory, which is an eschatological
overcoming of evil by good – but a purely ethical good would have no need any
longer with the ladder of metaphysics.
In this manner, the ultimate destiny of the world, made manifest by
Zoroaster, is a mystical transcendence of the world as such, and of the
metaphysical antithesis of which it was constituted. This antithesis, and the world it inhabits,
must, moreover, be overcome by man himself as he affirms the necessary
trajectory of his destiny. For
Zoroaster, this destiny achieves its eschatological and post-historical
fulfillment by means of an explicit affirmation of one principle over another,
good over evil, as counseled in the Avesta[14] in the
prescription of “Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds”. For Zoroaster, the meaning and destining of
the world is accomplished by a retrieval of the original state of Ahura Mazda.
Islamic thinkers have questioned Zoroaster ostensibly
over the number of ultimate principles of the world. As is affirmed repeatedly throughout the
Qurān, there is only one ultimate principle in the world and that
principle is Allah, a god who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent
(merciful). From this perspective, the
dichotomist schema posited by Zoroaster, even though this state is not
originary, not only constitutes a blasphemy against the power and singularity
of God, as is the case with the Christian trinity (a monstrous blasphemy),
but also raises the implicit possibility that an alternative principle of
ultimate “reality” is at least possible, that is evil. Zoroaster may rejoin that while he begins
with such a metaphysical opposition on the level of aesthetic or phenomenal
existence, the eschatology of this conflict would be similar to that of the
standard monotheistic equation. And this
very conflict has arisen in an original diremption of an originary archic
deity, Ahura Mazda into Vohu Manō and Angrō Mainyush. Amidst this discord of the self, Zoroaster
seeks a mystical transcendence of the world as a retrieval of an originary
no-thingness of the Good, of the One. Indeed,
considered from the perspective of the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus, for a
moment, it could be argued that evil is such a state of indeterminacy that it
can never properly be designated a principle, and can never therefore be
an alternative to the Good or the One.
Zoroaster himself would be shoulder to shoulder with the Islamists,
especially in the context of the question of evil, an assessment, in the
context of the fundamental decision of one principle over the other, of the
remembrance of the one over the other.
Zoroaster seeks the re-integration of Ahura Mazda in a transcendence of
the world. All things will return to
Allah.
For the Islamist, however, Zoroaster gives too much
metaphysical significance/independence to evil in the constitution of the
world, and to created, temporal beings in the fulfillment of the eschatological
destiny and fulfillment of the world.
Why should this fulfillment be conceived as a war, for instance? Indeed, one gains the surreal impression, in
the Qurān (and in the Hebrew testament), that Allah (or God) has not only
created evil - or is deploying something created even before him - as a weapon
and a test, and as a dissimulation. The
angels of Allah (or God), who refer to themselves as ‘We’, close the ears and
seal the eyes of the unbelievers – hardening their hearts, thus assuring their
doom. In their response to the one who
does not believe, who does not obey, evil, hardly an independent or
threatening force, simply a temporal worldly phenomenon, is deployed against
the unbeliever and even encouraged for those who are beyond hope and
mercy. The angels taunt the unbeliever –
go ahead and enjoy your unbelief – run riot in this time you have left, in
ignorance and blindness – for, in the end, everything and everyone, shall
return to Allah/God – and then be consigned to the fires.
In the end, Zoroaster shares with the Muslim the
belief in the end of the world, the logos
of judgment, of apocalypse, and the envelopment of the visible by the
invisible. In this way, Zoroaster, as
the father of the vision and riddle, of the conquest of evil by the good, of
the world of many by the eternal return to God, stands in a remarkable
situation of resemblance to Abraham, who remains the official patron of faith
of the One God by each of the monotheistic assertions, Judaism, Christianity
and Islam, each portrayed by Nietzsche as typologies of nihilism. Indeed, he shares much ambiguity with Abraham
in that each is a transitional figure who had to enact violence in order to create
a place for his new assertion. And,
while other spiritual formations such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and modern day
Zorostrianism do not regard Abraham as their point of departure, from the
perspective of Nietzsche’s genealogy of religious nihilism, there is a deep
metaphysical kinship between these assertions, one which constitutes more than
a family resemblance. Indeed, it is
Abraham who may serve as an archetype for any metaphysics of nihilism.
Abraham, as the name given to Abram in the wake of his
unambiguous demonstration of faith, stands or could stand implicitly, as I have
suggested, as the exemplar of faith for any eschatology that sees its
fulfillment in the overcoming and annihilation of the world and earth. Indeed, this trajectory is exhibited in the
practical metaphysics of Abram in his unquestioning submission and commitment
to the will of the One God. As the
narrative of Genesis unfolds, one that is explicitly shared by each of
the monotheist assertions (and implicitly by the other nihilist positions),
Abram is exposed as having a longstanding and direct relationship with the
divine. A significant encounter occurs
when he is told that his aged wife would bear him a son, a claim that arouses
an incredulous laughter in Abram and his wife Sarah. However, the seemingly impossible happens
through the logoV of god, amid an event which plants the seed of faith
in Abram. Such a faith is sufficient
even in its incipience for Abram to deny the traditional polytheistic faith of
his ancestors. Abram is willing to
confront his father and mother and deny his religion - indeed, to break with
all that has come before and to begin a new genealogy. Yet, such an advocacy, although important for
the latter day adherents of monotheism, does not in itself constitute the act
which is sufficient to merit the change of name to not only found a new
genealogy, but also to enact a new covenant for the progeny of the initiator of
this genealogy. The act which serves as
the exemplar of faith for the monotheistic assertions is thus not spiritual
patricide, but the willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac on the altar of his
god. Kierkegaard speculates in his Fear
and Trembling on the various scenarios which could explicate the meaning of
such a divine command for Abram, but the latter himself does not say a word in
response to the demand for a holocaust of the son he loves. He simply hears and seeks to obey. Abram makes ready for the sacrifice and
sleeps one last night in the knowledge, pre-monition, that with the daybreak he
will sacrifice his only son to his god.
With the return of the dawn, he departs with Isaac to the altar on the
mountaintop without a word to his son or to his wife Sarah. In response to a question from Isaac as to
the location of the sacrificial lamb, Abram responds reticently that god will
provide. As the narrative is fulfilled,
Abram places Isaac on the altar and raises his knife above his son – Isaac
witnesses the terrible truth - but at this moment beyond decision, the
angel Gabriel intercedes telling Abram that he need not act – he is let off the
hook, a comedy. Abram has passed the
test of faith, and with his new name, Abraham, is promised progeny who will
outnumber even the stars. Through his
demonstration of faith, Abraham has allowed a new world destiny to be
born. The same story is retold, but at a
higher level, when God sends his own son into the world as a sacrificial
lamb. Through the death of Jesus, God
undertakes that which he does not even demand of Abraham.
But, what is the metaphysical
significance of such an eschatology, this destiny? As diagnosed by Nietzsche, such a destiny is
that of nihilism, or in other words, a destiny of the world, which seeks at
once the annihilation of the world, an eschatology toward nothingness. Amid the certain knowledge of the existence
of God, and with the relative valuation of the ephemerality of temporal
existence, Abraham would willingly sacrifice his only son for this god – none
of this is sufficiently real to matter, Abraham would perhaps whisper. In that God exists, we should gladly give up
our lives of suffering and torment to join the perfection of the Father. Yet, for Nietzsche, God is dead – he
dies with Abraham’s whisper - God is stillborn, in not only his
admission that the creation itself is meaningless – it is nothing at all – but
also in the violent implications such inescapably earthly speech. In a similarly unsuccessful scenario in
Ancient Greek mythos, the presumptive One God Saturn attempts to swallow his
children, but, with a trick from his wife Rhea, coughs them all up. Zarathustra jests in “On Apostates” that the
old gods died a long time ago, not in a twilight (as with the liar Wagner), but
in a good godlike way:
…one day they laughed themselves to death. That happened when the most godless word
issued from one of the gods themselves – the word: “There is one god. Thou shalt have no other god before me!...
then all the gods laughed and rocked on their chairs and cried, “Is not just
this godlike that there are gods but no God?”[15]
Such a transference of the seat of value into the
negation of the teeming myriadity of the world of temporal existence is, for
Zarathustra, a flight into the Otherworld, but a denial of the earth that still
seeks to hang around – it is a will to power that pretends not to see the world
and earth as the only topoV of affirmation, as the place of the artwork and of
lived existence, of Life… It denies
perspective as to command and control all perspectives.
But, the adherent of such a destiny and eschatology of
the world will question Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism. He will respond to Nietzsche, this physician
of culture, with the demand for a second opinion. How, he will ask, is such a reversal possible
by which our exemplar of faith is turned into its opposite, into the very
annihilation of all affirmations of value, by which a faith in the invisible,
in the transcendent, in God, is transformed into nihilism, an inner void of
mere nothing? Or, on the contrary, was
not Abram’s seminal submission and commitment to god not in fact the extreme
opposite of nihilism or any seduction to the powers of nothingness? Indeed, is not the divine itself the fount of
all being, value, of all meaning, radically other to this fallen world of
fragmentation and decay? Who could
suggest otherwise? Why is the hope for a
If we consider the obverse perspective of Abram as the
archetype of faith amidst a logic of the One, we are struck by another Abraham,
one who is a radical exemplar of the annihilation of a longstanding terrestrial
expression and effusion of a sense and intimacy with the sacred. Indeed, the use of the term historical to
describe the mosaic of Pagan religious practice would not only nullify this
phenomena of the sacred amidst the mythological tapestry of the holy, of affirmation,
in the Pagan world, but would also erase the inauguration of history itself in
the destruction of the heritage of polytheistic apprehensions of the Sacred by
an incipient monotheistic cultural insurgency.
From this perspective, Abram is the great destroyer, similar in a
sense to the description by Plotinus of the violent and disruptive methods of
the early Christian activists throughout the Roman domain, or, perhaps,
Mendelssohn’s horror in the facelessness of Kant. But Abraham is the first, or, a first – he is
an initiator of a discursive formation,[17] a
beginner, an Adam. He abides in-between,
holding this undecidability within himself - even in his decision for
the One. This openness of ambiguity,
ambivalence of a truth event remains traced in his decision. Abraham is privy to the mystical foundations
of authority, his declaration of independence[18] from
the Pagan world is simultaneously an unambiguous assault on the world and
religion of his father and mother. He
destroys so as to found a new beginning, a new world order. However, just as he looks into the abyss,
amidst his decision, he covers over and supplants, with his artwork and seizure
of the origin, of the principle amidst the undecidable,[19] this
Openness amid temporal possibility. His mystical
foundation for authority[20] is
orchestrated as an event of retrospective and prospective transfiguration in
the guise of spectacles, events, and histories.
He, as with both Zarathustras, enters into the agon of a re-valuation of
values.
If a beginning in violence cannot completely and
intensively eradicate this trace of violence in its genealogy of hegemony,
such an attempt at complete and intensive eradication will merely legislate a
repetition of this trace. This trace, as
with the shadow, is inescapable - the irrepressible repetition of the project
of eradication does not serve the ostensible program of erasure, but of a
repetition of this situation of conflict, through which this program and
project are reproduced and augmented.
The trace becomes an alibi, one that is cultivated for its own
sake. The ostensible program for
legitimacy is a mask for, as Zarathustra suggests in “The Pale Criminal”, a
desire for blood - the killer fresh with blood on his hands steals from the
corpse in order to serve his conscience and his pride. He becomes a robber who has killed.[21] It is not at the foremost significant that a
cycle of violence becomes repeated and maintained for the good, but that
a repetition of violence is itself this metabolism of a violent ‘good’. A beginning in violence must live violently
if it is to live at all - it must ceaselessly repeat this ‘event’ of its
catastrophic [origin].
This trauma of the violent destruction by Abraham of
the gods of his ancestors, the idols of his father and mother, becomes repeated
not only in his own willingness to sacrifice his late-born son Isaac, but also
in the trajectory of his offspring, who in this covenant, countless as the
stars, exist in the repetition and perverse fulfillment of that original
trauma. More deeply considered, this
event of trauma in the midst of Abraham is itself only a repetition of that
more original trauma of the expulsion of Adam [and Eve] from the garden of
immortality and delight. Miranda has
suggested that the creation myth of Adam and Eve was a redaction which served
as the founding myth and genealogy for Abraham himself.[22] In this sense, Abraham symbolizes his
experience of transgression and power as a founding myth. Indeed, this pattern of trauma and repetition
intimates a deep structural logic not only for the entire narrative of Genesis,
and on throughout the Hebrew Torah and the Christian Old Testament, the
Christian New Testament and the Muslim Qūran. But, it is the triune of transgression,
punishment, and atonement, established in Genesis, which lays out the modus
operandi of the fragmented monotheistic dispensations. In this way, the transgression by Abraham
against the gods of his family is provided a mythical alibi and re-inscription
in the narrative of the Fall. This event
of transgression by the Adam and Eve inaugurates the passage from innocence to
guilt, from grace to punitive expulsion, and thus, erects an archetype, which
serves to define the essential character of ‘human nature’. How could Abraham have acted otherwise?
Amid the
perspective of this reversal, the polytheistic religion of the father and
mother of Abraham is re-branded as a condition of idolatry and transgression
against the one true God of Abraham.
Moreover, the seed of transgression, although facing the onslaught of
Divine wrath, remains alive as the trace or taint of original sin. One has sinned and has been punished, but due
to the basic existential character of the human being after the Fall, one will
sin again in the fulfillment of human nature. History is composed of the anecdotes of
sin. Indeed, this feature of the divine
ordination of sin emerged with an erotic twist with the Heresy of the Free
Spirit who incorporated sexual acts into their remembrance of the Last
Supper, their symposium, a celebration of the God of Love. Of course, in keeping with the strategy of
trauma, these heretics were burned at the stake. It is the Fall and its inexorable repetition,
which implicates a naive self-interpretation of the phenomenon of human
existence within a regime of guilt.
Before the Fall, there were no humans.
There was no before…
The taint of original sin, this seed of transgression,
plays itself out throughout Genesis in myriad ways. There is the overwhelming question, in the
first instance, of incest in the augmentation and perpetuation of the line of
Adam. While some would productively wish
to give deeper esoteric meanings to the fables in Genesis – or to
de-mythologize these texts – it is instructive to read off the implications of
a text in situ – which, we will recall, still serves as a fundamental
source in the very constitution of world-time, world history, political
history. While there is explicit
reference to incest in the case of Lot’s daughters after the destruction of
The supplantation of polytheism by Abraham et al.
is suppressed within and by the genealogy of Adam, through a displacement of
the hubristic act in an act of concealment. Terrorism dwells in a narrative of original
Fallenness. One can blame oneself, one
can detect in oneself an original sin and capacity for transgression, but the
root of this original evil, after Abraham, is located not in the supplantation
of the gods, but in the narrative of disobedience to the One God. In other words, the act of supplantation of
the holy, of the gods does not touch, implicate the One God - the guilt of
transgression is instead projected upon his enemy, upon creation, but in a way
that falsifies and shreds this founding act.
From the perspective of the ancestors of Abraham, this event is the
death of the gods. Abraham has
committed religious patricide, matricide, fratricide, deicide. Abraham gives birth to evil. But, simultaneous with this child of evil, is
the distortion and re-presentation of its origin – it is re-branded as its
opposite – it is hidden in the counter-offensive of accusations of primordial
guilt, original sin. God becomes the
good. From this perspective,
Abraham’s God is an event of truth, beauty, and good.
One will recall the diatribe of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
that the old gods laughed themselves to death in the face of this God
who claimed that he was the only god.
However, with all bad comedy, it has initiated a historicity of bad
tragedy. It is this pathos that is the destination of the monotheistic assertions,
which still persist as hegemonic and conflictual narratives of the sacred
amidst this terrestrial opening. For
Nietzsche, it is laughter that will free us from the unlimited bondage of a
“sacred” which is an imposture and mask for nihilism, a barbaric will to power,
will to nothingness. Yet, such laughter
is most difficult amidst the lacerations of the whip, shackle and the stake. One will remain a convalescent or aspire to
exist in such a state of convalescence.
These wounds run deep, the scars of the surface remain burned upon this
soul. Psyche[23] sits in
her own excrement in a dark cavern, amid the tunnels and chambers of an old,
dark castle and dungeon – her visitors decipher tattooed narratives and symbols
sliced across her skin. We are condemned
to read these inscriptions as well – but, upon our own souls, to decipher not
only our own inscription by the logic of the One, but also to fathom the trace,
genealogy, of the other beginning that hovers menacingly as that destruction of
not only the Pagan ethos, but also, especially with phenomena such as the
Inquisition, of which even Giordano Bruno was another victim, of any
sensibility to alterity or existential singularity.
In the face of the All stands an imposture, a mask,
the One God who is other. The sins of
the father become replayed, re-activated -- repeated -- in the children as they
seek to carry out, on, this regime of discipline and surveillance – purification,
cleansing, power - which is the heritage and legacy of their ancestors. Abraham supplants his own ancestors, his
mother and father, but with his displacement and re-presentation, he
re-appropriates the Law of the Ancestors - however, with the proviso
that he himself is the First of a New Covenant.
One must learn from the Sin of Adam, the father, but one must also
understand that through this artwork, and these labor pains of Abraham, humanity
is born again. While this
supplantation resembles in a superficial way the recurrence of overthrow in the
Mycenean tapestry, with the overthrow of Ouranos by Kronos, and the latter by
ZeuV, the destruction of Abraham stands at a radical
distance from the threads of kinship of dynastic succession exhibited in the
mythological genealogy of the Pagan gods.
This radical distance is constituted by the assertion of Truth by
Abraham in his dispute and eventual destruction of the gods of his father and
mother. This assertion of truth
supplants any indigenous criteria or scenario of transfiguration of an existing
muqoV. “Truth”
brings Abraham and his monotheistic genealogy onto the tenuous ground of
historicity. “God” resembles
Saturn. Yet, it is not clear if he will
vomit up the other gods and goddesses.
History begins amid a radical breach with
traditional mythological narrative. This
breach need not however imply that such a position escapes from the domain of muthos but will and must, from the
standpoint of its own rhetorical assertion, proclaim the death and irrelevance
of myth. As Bataille suggests in his
collection of essays on surrealism, The Absence of Myth,[24] such
a historicity, which feeds on the death of myth is indeed the greatest
myth. At the same time, while history
may be merely muthos in drag, the
logic of the One and rhetoric of Truth that abide in its origin and genealogy,
disrupt the evolving tapestry of traditional mythology and inaugurate a
strategy of displacement and substitution.
Even if the breach has for its raison d’etre the establishment of
another mythical principle and narrative, it deploys a strategy and rhetoric of
Truth which ostensibly defines itself as non-mythical or even
anti-mythical. Such a radical
positioning is often touted as the intellectual advance of an “ethical
monotheism”. However, such a denial and
suppression of the play of mythical existence abides in a metaphysics of
nothingness, of a desire to transcend the double bind of the world and
earth[25] – the noumenon dies as it is cut off
from its life in the phenomena.
One could extend, it this light, Nietzsche’s contention that
Christianity is platonism for the people to the entire Abrahamic
genealogy in its ultimate valuation of a domain that is other than the visible
and fallen existence of the All. With
Plato and Augustine, Abraham seeks via his New Covenant, to establish his own
poliV, a City of
However, despite the relative success of the
genealogies of Abraham, from a terrestrial-political perspective, it is the
very strategy and rhetoric of the One Truth, which, simultaneous to the
founding Act of the monotheistic conjectures, plants the seeds of its own
destruction. Indeed, the mere
possibility of its success would at once sound its own death knell. This Will to Truth that had been inaugurated,
abiding deep within its foundations a primordial will to power, will be, in its
victory, compelled to turn this will to Truth onto its own existence. In times of peace, the warlike man turns
against himself. Not only has the death
of the old gods set a precedent for the death of that which has been esteemed
as immortal, but also the very logic of supplantation as a will to Truth
already and inescapably sets out the primal scenario for the death of God. From this perspective, Abraham himself
becomes the ugliest man. His very
assertion of the primacy and exclusivity of his God was at once the murderous
blow against divinity. If you wish to
destroy a cause, become its most excessive advocate. The monotheistic assertion, in its objectification
- of God and in its proclamation that God is Truth, provokes the flood
of oblivion that will return this god to its own primal fate, into the sacred
well, back amidst the gods who laughed themselves to death. Not only is the trace of this original breach
disseminated as the ceaseless and inexorable fragmentation of the tragic
assertion of the One, in the narrative and congregational differance of
the progeny, but also as the very tools of the trade associated with this Will
to Truth become targeted on this assertion of the One, but only in the
auspicious Moment of its triumph. That
which is exposed in light of the execution of Socrates’ maxim that the unexamined
life is not worth living is that the assertion of the One itself rests upon
a muthos, one which stands, as
Nietzsche contends, opposed to life.
The razor of historical criticism begins the self-lacerating project of
digging for and unearthing its own roots in its enactment of its inherited Will
to Truth… a god of tragic death… another Dionysian tragic hero departs from the
Apollonian dreamworld into the primal oneness of being.
Reiner Schürmann suggested that the death of an idea
always seems to take much longer than its birth.[26] It took almost two millennia for the God of
History to be subjected to the procedures of historicism, methodologies, which
were born alongside itself as its spear and shield. We have killed God. We are the Ugliest
Novelty under the Sun: Two Notions
of the Will and Will to Power
The
Preacher of Ecclesiastes would have us believe that a creative life is
lived in vain, that there is nothing new under the sun. Indeed, any assertion of novelty in this
world of finitude is vanity in light of the homeless fate of such expression
and exertion. Both the Master and Slave
are fated to Death -- the one is no more significant than the other -- each
meets this Other in his End. All works
perish or are appropriated by the latecomers.
All is vanity. There is
nothing left to do but drink a little wine and pass the time with one’s fellows
as this is one’s God-given portion. Amidst
this double bind of finitude and hope, one need, and can only wait - for Death…
for God. As Heidegger himself eventually
sighed, “Only a god can save us now”,[27] and in
his own turn toward piousness, re-inaugurates the metaphysics of the preacher,
another ass festival.
At the
end of the day, the ‘metaphysics’ of this Preacher are the same as that of
Abraham. That same dichotomy persists
between this visible world of decay and fragmentation and that eternal,
invisible Otherworld. For both of these
figures, it is the latter, which holds all value and abides all hope. The willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his
late-born son Isaac is, as I have suggested, merely a repetition of his own
fateful supplantation of these earthly gods of his father and mother. His faith is given to a god that is out of
this world, in the facelessness of which this world is without
value, the only significance of which is its own insignificance. Yet, even as this world is, with Zarathustra,
something that is to be overcome, it remains, as with the barren
This Will
of God that is the a-topos for the expression of a logos, however, explicitly
asserts that it is the only True Will.
It further asserts that It is not only Truth, but also Good,
Beauty, Sublime, and Moral. It is further asserted that these virtues reside
elsewhere, beyond this fallen world, there in that No-thing. In light of his resistance to a trajectory of
the One, the One God, Nietzsche proclaims that this other world is a laughable
and a nihilistic falsification of Life.
He juxtaposes another narrative in the Birth of Tragedy, that of
the Will in Schopenhauer, as an incessant primal power, which while it is
singular and alone, is explicitly conceived as the raging heart of the world,
as the non-conscious striving of Life.
For his Schopenhauer, it
was not the clarity of the concept or the light of another world, but in music
and poetry that the Will could be intimated, disclosed. In its insatiable emanations, this Will seeks
to express itself – to hear and see itself - to satisfy its futile desire for
self knowing and repose. While
Schopenhauer will, in his tragic pessimism, expose himself as a nihilist,
closely aligned with Abraham and the Preacher as to the ultimate value
of an earthly Will, he has disclosed the existence of an alternative conception
of Will, as a will to existence, as a liberating will to expression and
self-understanding. Even if Schopenhauer
prescribes a pessimistic negation of this Will, and therefore, to existence,
this Will, or that which is indicated with this nomos, exhibits a will none the less, even is as a Will to
Nothing. Just as the persistence of the
trace, memory, of the subjugations of the Pagan ethos and gods by Abraham and
the other monotheist auto-genitors germinates the seeds of the destruction of
the upstart God, the antithesis to Nothingness and mere Existence explodes the
pretension that there is only One Will.
Kant seems to have been aware of these gods when he contrasted
unconditional duty and self-love in his Religion within the Limits of Reason
Alone.
Each of
these notions of the Will projects a great longing, one as a will for that
which is beyond itself, a desire for the nouminous. The other, an insatiable desire for
self-comprehension, communication, existence in an all too fleeting temporal opening. In the former case, the Nothing that is
sought is beyond where the horizon lies, but such a withdrawal is meant to
simultaneously be the ground for all things.
In the latter case, the longing consists in the impossibility, in the
finite emanation, of self-subsistent compact repose. All will return to the source, but that
source is inside, in an eternal willing.
Yet, even in their apparent opposition with respect to the seat of all
meaning and reference, both of these positions imply a radical rejection of the
possibility of an affirmation of Life – despite the insurmountable horizons of
finitude and mortality. For Abraham, this
world is not properly Real - its actuality, he would emphasize, discloses that everything
solid melts into air. One can be
clear and certain only in God and his New Covenant. For Schopenhauer, the very futility of the
bad infinite disclosed in the Will to Survival and Expression, while an
adequate description of existence in specific respects, serves to refute
life and the world. The system of
needs and the radical absence of satisfaction of the needs of a striving Will
(certainly no omnipotent and omniscient God), the pointless exertion and
expression seeking only the persistence of this selfsame state of inexorable striving,
always unsatisfied, always seeking more of the same – the futility of life
might be better served in the self-negation of the Will. But, even this reprieve is forbidden.
The world of the ego, as with Buddhism, is a world
that is not properly Real, it persists as a house of cards of borrowed thoughts
and vague self-awareness. The ego, which
is the mask of the Will, must be broken apart in order for the Will to be
silenced. The striving and suffering of
the Will must be denied, if there is to be oneness and repose. Both of these doctrines, each in its own way,
set out a temporary metaphysic of duality, as with Zoroaster, that, in its
strategic polarity, reveals an eschatology of the One, and in both cases the eschaton
lies elsewhere from the World, this topos of illusion, futility, and an
impossible insurrection against nothingness.
The One need only acknowledge the Other as long as the creation remains
alienated as Other. In and of itself,
the World has no meaning, it is as the skin shed by a snake, of no consequence,
not left behind – but, secretly assimilated, eaten as forbidden fruit.
However,
a voice of distress calls out in the Night about the Earth, our fair
Sister. This voice declares, in opposition
to the previous assertions of will, that We must remain true to the earth. The voice of yet another Other, of this
impossible insurrection against not only the regime and aroma of
Nothingness, but also against mere Survival, insatiable, frustrated
expression, indicates a [will] that is alterior to the incestuous wills of
negation and repetition. In the face of
this will to annihilation sounds the voice of impossible striving, which
although subjected and suppressed, still ceaselessly exists, inexorably creates
beyond itself, playing out this dice game of chance. Yet, with this consideration, we sense that
we must step back from this notion of [will] as it is itself merely a veil that
has been cast over all things, it is a fiction that dances over myriad events,
tying, suturing them together, in order to fashion a single Reality, Actuality,
Existence - this world. It has
chased the poets away with its edifice of truth, but it is itself exposed as
‘only a fool, only a poet’.[28] If these wills collapse into the same, it is
the striving amidst the earth that remains for Nietzsche, that which exceeds and explodes the bridges
and fences stretched across her skin and her rivers. The persistence of the trace of resistance to
the grand narrative of either conception of the will shatters the aura of a
substantial and monocratic explanation of Ultimate Reality. Indeed, an ultimate reality may be another
construction – that which exists is an earthly actuality that always trails off
into perspective and is appropriated and transfigured amid this situation of
personal being. With this utter
fragmentation and deconstruction of the nomenclature of the Will as a
substantial Unity – whether God, primal surge or ding an sich – there
emerges the other event(s) that indicate an alterity, an impossible
insurrection against Nothingness and Survival, a willing that is Other than
Will. Or, in other words, the genealogy
of the Will, and its re-presented phantasmogorical triumph, that Great Lie that
almost fooled everyone, becomes traced to a deeper origin in a more primal
event of willing, a will to power, of creation and transfiguration. Zarathustra exclaims in On Self-Overcoming,
Indeed,
the truth was not hit by him who shot at the word of the ‘will to existence’:
that does not exist. For, what does not
exist cannot will; but what is in existence, how could that still want
existence? Only where there is life is
there also will: not will to life but – thus I teach you – will to power.[29]
This will to power, as a phrase, differs from the hard
and fast nomenclature of a metaphysics of substance, of permanence. In this way, Schopenhauer’s emphasis on
changes of states in his early writings, which after all are makeshifts for the rest, discloses a continual flux of
creativity which must resist to survive and grow another place to build
its own will to creation, even if it is born out of the birth canal of the
totalistic hegemony of a single God or arce.
And it is reminded ceaselessly that it is not alone. Yet, doctrines of the One break down in that
they are not able to suppress the trace of their own will to power, of their
own ‘origin’ in the exceptional amidst this play of chance. The irrepressible affirmation of this event
of Life resists Not only the otherworldly stratagems which seek to contain,
harness and discipline this predicament of unfathomable chance amid a teloV of the otherworldly.
It also resists the Will to Survival, which is subverted by an awakening
to its own uncertain emergence in Chance, amidst the uncertain flux, this will
to power/creation. The Will was
yesterday’s art, insatiable, seeking, but without ultimate success - to be Art
itself, and in this way, to abolish all art and all future artists. Amid the will to power, any question of a One
becomes deferred into an impossible future as it is concerned with the
temporary eruption of many ones and twos.
Nietzsche poses the question in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra: Who will be the one who will grasp hold of chance, in the
moment, and exclaim, ‘Thus I willed it’?
If this is not to be the faceless repetition of the arce that we have
already excavated, and if it is to be an opening which gives, makes or takes
space for new creation, it must be the creator, the Child, who is that
one who grasps hold of this legacy of accidents and witnesses these amid an
innocence of becoming. With the event of
lightning, light that shatters the old law tablets, the creator erupts into the
aura of this creative event. With this Opening amidst this No-where of
freedom, in the destructive resistance to the Laws and destination of the One,
in the inauguration of this play-space of chance, novelty erupts under the
sun. That which is new is to be
understood amid the contours of that place of [origin], inextricably tied up
amidst the regional jurisdictions of the arch, whether that be religion, the
state, or the marketplace. That which
has characterized the operation of this religious assertion is, in tandem with
the state and the market, the suppression of all that is Other. For the former, it is the other gods,
specifically female goddesses, its violent exclusion and repression of nature,
body, sex, life, joy. Monotheism, in
other words, has attained the aspirations of its will to power, a will that is
couched in the rhetoric of Otherworldly desires, in an ultimacy that is elsewhere. It has fulfilled its longing at the cost of
sacrifice – of life, and of affirmation of all gathers together as World and
Earth. It denies new creation in its
lust to be the last of all creations – it is the black snake in your
throat. It even denies its own
responsibility and capacity for creation as its laws and its very historicity
are attributed to Revelation. It
camouflages its own will to power as the negation of all will to power, and thus,
forbids all will to creation. Yet, its
hatred for the world and flesh reveals its desire for the Same (although it
always awaits the End, in one form of the other). It substitutes Repetition for Creation. The monotheist assertion seeks to maintain its
hegemony via the destruction and suppression of all that is Other than
itself. It seeks to put a halt to the
possibility of new creation as any novelty would stand as a question mark over
its claims to ultimacy. Novelty screams
as an exception to its privileged status.
The
truth of the monotheist assertion is dragged within the final sentences of
Nietzsche’s posthumously edited and published fragments, The Will to Power,
“This world is will to power -- and nothing else besides? And you
yourselves are also this will to power – and nothing else besides.”[30] In its nihilistic hypocrisy, the monotheist
will to power postures as being a will to no-thingness, a will which seeks to
transcend power, to annihilate will, to return to a God who is beyond the world
and earth. Yet, as it does not act
quickly to vacate itself from the face of the earth, or let a new world be
born, to die at the right time,
it becomes clear that this rhetoric of beneficence is merely a masque for a
specific type of will to power that seeks merely to perpetuate itself as
long as it can. However, as
intimated, the cost of such a perpetuation of its own will to power, especially
in its bad faith, is the sacrifice of any new will to creation, of any
differing will to power, and more specifically that which is an eruption of
this innocence of becoming, this Dionysian power of life, death and
rebirth. The power of life is the power
of creation, a power of creative effervescence that gives forth novelty
under the sun. Zarathustra exhorts
the crowd in the marketplace - he is a madman shouting:
I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give
birth to a dancing star. I say unto you:
you still have that chaos in yourselves.
Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a
star. Alas, the time of the most
despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.[31]
It is precisely this chaos that the monological
assertion seeks to suppress, to eradicate, annihilate – the rattle of this dice
throw of chance must be silenced, the very possibility of creation in this
realm must be destroyed. But, as every
act of destruction is also one of creation, that which is created via the
destruction of the Dionysian power of life is the Last Man, the nihilist, the
impotent consumer incapable of new creation or self-overcoming, much less
self-sufficiency – this last man is suppressed, contained, and anonymous
amid its belonging in the herd – he forgets just as soon as he thinks, chewing
his cud in blissful ignorance. But, this
is ignorance, sculpted via burned flesh - not simply a tabula rasa, but
a complex construction of a simulacrum – via the fire the Last Man learned to
say ‘I will’ – but not as a will that is an affirmation of will to power, to
new creation, but as a submission to a will that is other, to a stratagem of
torture, indoctrination and regimentation – he wills in that he is willed,
in that he should, in his obligation – for after all, he is woman,
he is guilty. That which in a
previous epoch was worshipped as the irrepressible power of the fertility of
life in a ceaseless dance of novelty is given a new status, a new value,
devalued, destroyed via the violence of a radically other repository of
significance. The Otherworld is the
latest fashionable delicacy of the Last Man.
New creation becomes at best a mere vanity amid an expendable world of
(f)utility - at its worst, new creation is heresy, evil… New creation is a
threat to the regime of monocratic assertion.
New creation, and the very physiological possibility of such new
creation, must be annihilated.
Possible creators of the future must be made sick, so that they will be
able only to serve these legacies of the past.
Their innocence must be turned to guilt, their health to disease, their
strength to weakness. Order and form
suppress the Dionysian power of life and inaugurate the conditions of weakness,
which will be expressed as a will to nothingness, as a will that has been made
weary by its own regime of suppression.
The suppression of this chaos in one’s soul in the monotheist assertion
sings the same tune as the excess of order and of morality not only Plato’s
Otherworldly hypothesis, but also, as a microcosm, via the discipline,
regimentation and surveillance in The Republic. It is bad enough that those who sought to
articulate this power of life, the poets, were excluded from the city – on the
grounds that they lied too much – but it is worse that this entire arrangement
of the polis rests upon the precipice of a Noble Lie --- the Big Lie. The order of the poliV is to be maintained at all costs, the unity of the
One is to be pre-eminent to any of its many parts or of anything that should
be excluded in the limit situation of its founding arch. Music and song become suspect – poiesis is
only cultural, never having the status of praxiV.
Nietzsche
claims that it is precisely this obsession upon ‘unity’ – or what could be
described as an attempted annihilation of the Dionysian by the Apollonian –
that sets the stage for the incessant weakening and eventual self-annihilation
of the so-called Greek world – and of the Christian world, as the latter is
merely ‘Platonism for “the people”’.[32] For Nietzsche, this obsession is itself
already a symptom of weakness, a weariness of life. It longs for that which is radically other as
it cannot stand this life. Yet,
even its will to no-thing is still an expression of its will to power - its
perverse and repressed ‘affirmation’ of this life. The Dionysian power of chaos that tears
through life, shattering the household in the tragic event, will no longer be
allowed to run amok amid the polis.
It will be rooted out in a realm of a pure Good in itself,
one in which this perspectival character of life, innocent, before good
and evil, will be annihilated. From the
enforced, and thus universalized, perspective, tied inside the panopsiV of the Good - the Dionysian power of life, the chaos
at the heart of the creative act, is renamed “Evil”. But with Schelling, Nietzsche warns that such
an uprooting will serve ironically as the death-knell of such a project
of purification and unification.
Zarathustra awakens the youth on the mountainside,
But it is with man as it is with the tree. The more he aspires to the height and light,
the more strongly do his roots strive earthward, downward, into the dark, the
deep – into evil.[33]
In the masquerade, the
weak soul denies its will to power, it suppresses its Dionysian power, it
represses and erases the truth of itself in a regime of forgetfulness,
of disciplinary containment amid this cheerfulness of its own nihilistic
solipsism. Life itself is poisoned,
postponed - any trace of this power of life slowly suffocates under the weight
of Repetition, this ceaseless re-assertion of that logic of the One. It is the Overman who will bite the head off
the snake which eats its own tail.