The Thinking Man’s Bible and Messiah: A Personal Reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (Part 2)

Link to Part 1: http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2012/11/the-thinking-mans-bible-and-messiah.html

Of all the accusations Nietzsche hurls at Christianity, it is the sanctification of untruths concerning earthly matters that is the gravest:

God is a thought that makes all that is straight crooked and all that stands giddy. What? Would time be gone and all that is transitory only a lie?

…

I call it evil and misanthropic, all this teaching about the one and the perfect and the unmoved and the sufficient and the intransitory.

All that is intransitory – that is but an image! (On the Blissful Islands, 110-11)

Nietzsche claims that Christian belief inculcates the wrong perception of reality in the believer. The belief in an unchanging, perfect God is philosophically false, since nothing in the universe we inhabit is “intransitory.” Everything is always in flux, and divine constancy can be nothing but a deception. For Nietzsche (or Zarathustra), constancy is an inadmissible concept. An existence that is unchanging can never develop; if there is no development, there can be no life. He stresses that creation “requires suffering and much transformation,” that in life “there must be much bitter dying.” He then calls upon all creators (mankind) to be “advocates and justifiers of all transitoriness” (111).  

When Nietzsche says that all things are transitory, he has (Christian) morals in mind. The very moral tenets that have been carved in stone are not eternal after all:

Truly, I say to you: Unchanging good and evil does not exist! From out of themselves they must overcome themselves again and again.

…

And he who has to be a creator in good and evil, truly, has first to be a destroyer and break values.

Thus the greatest evil belongs with the greatest good: this, however, is the creative good. (Of self-Overcoming, 139)

The impermanence of morals means that Man must keep reinventing the notions of good and evil. The courageous man must act as a destroyer of existing values, for only then can greatness be born. Nietzsche calls this “the creative good.” It is “creative” because Man, no longer in a doctrinal straitjacket, will create out of freedom. The philosopher also sees himself as some kind of a visionary mystic-poet. Creativity is therefore his indispensable driving force.

Creativity propels life forward, but it needs to “feed on” conflict to do so. A world without conflict (which Christianity has aimed to shape) is a world of passivity and complacency – worthless to the heroic man. Nietzsche says that the world should be full of filth, but warns that fatalism or cynicism must not colour our attitude:

There is much filth in the world: so much is true! But the world itself is not yet a filthy monster on that account!

There is wisdom in the fact that much in the world smells ill: disgust itself creates wings and water-divining powers!

Even in the best there is something to excite disgust; and even the best is something that must be overcome!

O my brothers, there is much wisdom in the fact that there is much filth in the world! (Of Old and New Law-Tables, 222)

The “filth” in the world, then, is a source of wisdom for Man; the harder he struggles, the wiser he will become. The word “overcoming” (überwinden) is Nietzsche’s favourite. It is used to refer to any act of struggle or self-mastery: one must overcome even one’s will to power. Overcoming must be every man’s destiny because “life wants to raise itself on high with pillars and steps; it wants to gaze into the far distance and out upon joyful splendour…” (Of the Tarantulas, 125). Nietzsche’s constant reference to height suggests that he sees life as an act of elevation: “And because it (life) needs height, it needs steps and conflict between steps and those who climb them! Life wants to climb and in climbing overcome itself” (125).

Today’s society’s demand for equal rights is therefore antithetical to Nietzsche’s call for self-overcoming (Selbst-Überwindung). Equality, a Western idea of Christian origin, eliminates conflict and renders life meaningless:

That there is battle and inequality and war for power and predominance even in beauty: he teaches us that here in the clearest parable.

How divinely vault and arch here oppose one another in the struggle: how they strive against one another with light and shadow, these divinely-striving things.

Beautiful and assured as these, let us also be enemies, my friends! Let us divinely strive against one another! (Of the Tarantulas, 125)

Nietzsche’s theory can be easily misappropriated by propagandists (Hitler’s regime did a fine job), since its intention is at times clouded by its imaginative imagery. The lines above, though bellicose in tone on the surface, do not preach warfare. They simply call the reader’s attention to the fact that warfare and inequality is the nature of the world. Rather than denying these tendencies, we should accept them and learn from them. We should strengthen ourselves through the imagery of warfare, and be prepared to “strive against one another,” i.e. to compete with one another to reach the summit of excellence. Competition, or competitiveness, is central to Nietzsche’s philosophy.

With the act of striving comes Nietzsche’s most challenging philosophical assertion: that of the eternal recurrence. The most common interpretation of this theory is that all the events in the universe repeat themselves ad infinitum, that all roads lead to the same well-trodden roads. The idea is explicitly introduced in the renowned chapter "Of the Vision and the Riddle," in an exchange between Zarathustra and a dwarf:

‘Behind this gateway, dwarf!’ I went on: ‘it has two aspects. Two paths come together here: no one has ever reached their end.

‘This long lane behind us: it goes on for an eternity. And that long lane ahead of us – that is another eternity.

‘They are in opposition to one another, these paths; they abut on one another: and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is written above it: “Moment”.

…

‘Behold this moment!’ I went on. ‘From this gateway Moment a long, eternal lane runs back: an eternity lies behind us.

‘Must not all things that can run have already run along this lane? Must not all things that can happen have already happened, been done, run past?

…

‘For all things that can run must also run once again forward along this lane.

…

‘ – and must we not return and run down that other lane out before us, down that long, terrible lane – must we not return eternally?’ (178-9)

It is an opaque passage that has had many philosophers and scientists, particularly mathematicians, debate over the validity of its theory. On a superficial level, the theory of the eternal recurrence can be taken to mean the endless repetition of the exact same events. Mathematicians have questioned this possibility, doubting if events, even if the notion of the infinity of time were to hold water, would exactly replicate one another. [*] This would be true if one were to interpret Nietzsche’s theory mathematically. But Nietzsche was no mathematical/analytical philosopher; his concerns are of a less technical but more encompassing nature. When he asks the rhetorical questions “Must not all things that can run have already run along this lane? Must not all things that can happen have already happened, been done, run past?”, he does not mean the lining up of fixed events waiting to happen again. He means to make a more universal point: that the state of being is not eternal or permanent, that it will always be “undone” by the act of returning. This understanding of the eternal recurrence is key to appreciating Nietzsche’s standpoint: if every phenomenon, deed, or thought in the human realm is constantly being destabilised, it can be inferred that none of the (religious) truths and beliefs we hang our faith on are valid. They are, contrary to what Moses indicated, not written in stone. This shift in truth perception is the most precious form of enlightenment Man can grant himself. [+] With the acknowledgement that no truths are beyond reproach, orthodoxy will have no ground to stand on. Man will be liberated from the ideological manacles of organised religion.

  

[*] For a detailed discussion of the impossibility of events precisely replicating themselves, refer to Georg Simmel. Gilles Deleuze, however, argues the exact opposite, giving credence to Nietzsche’s theory.

[+] Nietzsche would go on to expound on the deception of the eternal truth (or “conviction”) in The Anti-Christ.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans: R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin Books, 2003.