Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Nietzsche in Reverse

In his parable of the madman, Nietzsche implies that one must be both a little crazy and ahead of one's time to recognize that God is dead -- like a wild-eyed prophet, really, bearing the stark news that men are not yet prepared to accept:

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?," he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers."

But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns?

Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.

[Comment from the future present: I had a guffah-ha! experience the other day while reading this excellent essay on Dávila, highlighting his link to Nietzsche, his twin aphorist from a different father:

For all his talk about the Church and civilization, why was this conservative and reactionary thinker likened to Nietzsche? For one, several of Gómez Dávila’s aphorisms seem to be responses pointed at Nietzsche’s philosophy: “The death of God is an interesting opinion, but one that does not affect God.” One student describes Gómez Dávila as an interlocutor of Nietzsche, because they are both confronted with the same problem of transcendence within humanity. According to Gómez Dávila, the suicidal factor of modernity to which society had become most accustomed consisted of “shooting a bullet into the soul,” killing God. Modern man had replaced God with a label, “humanity” that represented nothing: “Many love humanity only in order to forget God with a clear conscience,” he wrote.

But Gómez Dávila was no nihilist, though he was a cynic and Epicurean. He was sympathetic to Nietzsche, writing that “Nietzsche would be the only noble inhabitant of a derelict world. Only his choice could be exposed without shame to the resurrection of God.” For Gómez Dávila, Nietzsche’s inquiry was an honest one; it destroyed him and proved the importance of hierarchy: From Nietzsche’s commitment to criticize morality and uphold perspectivism came the possibility to recognize man’s finiteness, and this is represented in Nietzsche’s tragic spiritual collapse. In many ways, Nietzsche had correctly assessed the problems of modernity when he dismissed the importance of God: Gómez Dávila wrote, “Reading Nietzsche as a response is not understanding him. Nietzsche is an immense interrogation.”

It was Nietzsche’s nihilism, and the “suicidal” impulse of the West that chose doubt and cowardice over faith that paved the way for a true rediscovery of God, although we are still trying to get there. Gómez Dávila does not view Western civilization’s course as irreversible: His aphorisms demonstrate his view that there is hope for the future because it is connected to a redemption that can only come about through the questioning or outright denial of God. From this point, it is possible to bring about a resumption of the natural order of things. Perhaps this is the task that Gómez Dávila envisioned for the conservative, the reactionary, or the philosopher.

You might say Nietzsche was the last honest atheist. You might also say that honesty is one of the names of God -- or that honesty is of course ordered to the very truth that is unthinkable in the absence of God. No wonder he went insane. But insanity is one of the two honest responses to atheism, the other being suicide.]

Again, Nietzsche is refreshingly candid, not to mention poetic, about the implications of deicide. I'll take a deicidal literary genius any day over an atheistic mediocrity, because at least the former points up and out in spite of himself. In other words, to deny God is to have transcended the material world (and let us not forget that transcendence proceeds in both vertical directions, which is why man is the only creature who can sink beneath himself).

The problem with our contemporary atheists is that they are shaped by an altogether different culture than was Nietzsche, essentially the cramped world of scientism instead of the wider world of art, letters, and literature. You might say that the styleless style of contemporary atheism that flows from vulgar scientism is just too facile to be true. With a little education, anyone can believe it, which our trolls prove. To put it another way, nothing can be as easy as atheism, let alone everything.

Being an intellectually consistent atheist poses as much -- if not more -- of a challenge than being a consistent theist. After all, a theist has the aid of heaven, whereas the atheist must accomplish his promethean -- not to say sisyphean -- task on his own. (Interesting that no matter where man goes, myth has been there first, from stealing light to rolling stones. Myth always comprehends man more than man comprehends myth, unlike, say, science, where this relation is reversed.)

In a way, the mythic situation sketched out by Nietzsche parallels the situation of Adam, or, if one prefers, the first man who awakened to his manhood and thereby became one. These questions confront any man qua man, e.g., Where are we moving? Is there any actual direction, or is this a meaningless question? Is there any up or down, or any vertical at all? Are we not floating, as through an infinite nothing? And how shall we comfort ourselves? What means of atonement, what sacred rituals shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of man too great for a mere man, an unimpressive biped who learned to yap just yesterday and hasn't shut up since? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of our manhood?

If it is true that myth shapes man -- that there exist preconceptual categories through which thought courses -- then each man is heir to the ontological inclinations of all men, irrespective of whether one calls it theism or atheism. Thus, we have "prophets of atheism" such as madman Nietzsche, who has more in common with a prophet of God than with the contemporary atheistic scribbler.

Now, man in his natural state is spontaneously oriented to God. This is something no one could deny, because the anthropological evidence proves there is no culture without the conception of an absolute that accounts for the genesis of the cosmos, the purpose of existence, and the means of salvation.

That being the case, in order for the madman prophet of atheism to succeed, he must not only murder God, but destroy the very conditions that make God necessary. Because if he doesn't eliminate those conditions, then they will continue to evoke God.

Consider a physiological analogy. You can ban sweets, but so long as human beings have a sweet tooth, they will keep discovering and being drawn to sweets.

Continuing with the analogy, the dietary madman can't just ban sweets, but must flood the world with anti-sweets propaganda, so that a kind of unnatural aversion is superimposed over the natural attraction.

Ideology functions in the same way, for example, vis-a-vis the LGBTQETC agenda. In order to transform something everyone knows is unnatural into something natural, the instinct of aversion must be displaced, which is how and why "homophobia" was invented. I suppose there are a handful of true homophobes with psychological issues of their own -- people with an infrarational (and not transrational) animus toward homosexuals -- but the real purpose of the homophobia accusation is to shame and pathologize normalcy. Similarly, if Islam really means what it says, why wouldn't someone be Islamophobic? (And recall that phobos is fear, not hatred.)

So in order to truly eradicate God, we must amputate, excise, or in some way annihilate that part of man that is spontaneously oriented toward his creator and source. We have seen how this works in America over the past seventy-five years or so, whereby the legal system now functions in this overtly destructive manner.

To take just one absurd example that comes to mind, a few years ago the County of Los Angeles was forced (not that there was any resistance on the County's part) by the court to remove a tiny cross from its official seal, which required millions of dollars to track down every last seal on every car, every office door, every building, every piece of stationery. The cross had always been there, as it is a banal historical fact that the territory was settled by Spanish missionaries, but as always, history must bow before ideology. Plus, you know, the government has so much money anyway, we don't know what to do with it. After all, we only have 60,000 homeless people living in Los Angeles alone...

In Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, Voegelin explains how it all goes down. It is the task of the ideological historian,

once the world beyond truth has disappeared, to establish the truth of this world. Thus, the critique of heaven is transformed into the critique of earth; the critique of religion, into the critique of law; the critique of theology, into the critique of politics (Bottomore, italics in original).

Note that this is no longer a disinterested quest for truth as we have come to understand it, but a kind of mental or psycho-spiritual activism; it is no longer theory, but practice:

Its subject is its enemy, which it seeks not to refute, but to annihilate.... It no longer acts as an end in itself, but only as a means. Its essential emotion is indignation; its essential task is denunciation (ibid).

Boy, is that true. In another book I was reading this weekend, I came across this little wisecrack, that "Indignation usually erupts into exaggeration." Over the past three years we've seen how the Trump-derangement of the left has transformed its seething hordes of simpleminded imbeciles into even simpler imbeciles convulsed by even more hatred than usual. It hasn't worked thus far, so expect the seething to be cranked up to 11 until the 2020 election and beyond. Indeed, this seething frustration is probably a permanent feature of deicide, as the murderers vainly attempt to force transcendence to be immanence, which is of course impossible.

10 comments:

julie said...

But insanity is one of the two honest responses to atheism, the other being suicide.

Indeed. Today, many who call themselves "atheists" are just pagans or even outright satanists. They don't even really try to hide it. It's not necessarily that they believe there's no God, it's just that they really, really hate him and would prefer pretty much anything or anyone else. Although plenty do seem to be insane...

Continuing with the analogy, the dietary madman can't just ban sweets, but must flood the world with anti-sweets propaganda, so that a kind of unnatural aversion is superimposed over the natural attraction.

As unpleasant as it sounds, the reality is much more disgusting: Kids frolic with drag queens at the library. As the writer notes, if this behavior were happening with an unknown, ordinary adult, male or female, it would be deeply, incredibly creepy. But somehow, since it's an over-the-top drag queen, it's billed as innocent, family-friendly fun. In this case, the natural aversion is being subverted to create a sense of normalcy and unnatural attraction.

The real mystery, though, is why so many people are willing to subject their kids to this. The story hours wouldn't be happening if people weren't bringing their kids.

Clown world.

Gagdad Bob said...

My son is surely transphobic but doesn't have a hateful bone in his body.

Gagdad Bob said...

Actually, it's just a natural disgust, mingled with pity, not fear.

julie said...

Yep, my kids, too. Not fear or hate, just a healthy reaction to something that is clearly wrong and disturbing.

Gagdad Bob said...

Funny how the left pretends to love nature while simultaneously despising what is natural.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of America being reduced to mobs of deplorables struggling against the simpleminded imbeciles, I once debated with my grandpa that the stars weren’t holes poked in the fabric separating us from heaven (as he firmly believed). I believed that instead, it was the big bang which was that, that Satan had poked a hole in the heavenly fabric and the universe spilled out before God could plug up the hole. So God had to get the Bible written and do what he could to try and clean up the mess using prophets, floods, Lot’s wife and all. He didn’t do quite as good a job as he could’ve since this was his first big heavenly spill.

So Grandpa sent me to bed without my bedtime snack claiming that God was making him do it.

Still, I really do think that religion is a good thing. It’s helpful for folks. But I really do think that pew replenishment is worse when certain conditions aren’t being met. It's part of the fishing of men I guess. I liked the scene in the old War of the Worlds movie when folks were praying in church and then the godless aliens died of diseases. It was way better than the newer War of the Worlds when nobody was seen praying and the aliens died of diseases anyways and that dangblasted Scientologist Tom Cruise appeared to take credit for it all.

An aside, but did you know that Lot's Wife is a tourist attraction in the Holy Land?

julie said...

So in order to truly eradicate God, we must amputate, excise, or in some way annihilate that part of man that is spontaneously oriented toward his creator and source. We have seen how this works in America over the past seventy-five years or so, whereby the legal system now functions in this overtly destructive manner.

A few weeks ago, in the comments at Vanderleun's, somebody linked to a very interesting blog, These Stone Walls. It is written (though not posted, as he has no computer access but rather types the posts and sends them to a friend who puts them online) by a priest who claims, perhaps credibly, that he was wrongfully accused of molestation and who is now serving a very long prison sentence in New Hampshire. Interesting in no small part because he blogs about his faith from the inside, as it were. As we know here, prison is truly no barrier to freedom.

Reading his post this morning, and following some of the links therein, an observation of his stood out to me regarding the effects of not only credible abuse claims which go unpunished or only lightly punished, but also of false claims that manage to wreak great suffering upon the accused:

"The story is about four boys growing up with abusive or absent fathers on the streets of New York City’ s “Hell’ s Kitchen” in the early 1960s. Father Bobby befriends them, and they him and provides the only male bonding and role modeling they will ever know. Father Bobby is their nautical keel, the one force keeping the ship of their lives aright upon a raging sea.

The irony for us is the fact that today, that alone would throw Father Bobby under the bus of suspicion His relationship with these four boys would earn him a trip to Maryland’s St Luke Institute where his over-familiarity with them translates into a one-way ticket out of the priesthood. The young men of the story can just go to hell. Carcaterra’s story makes clear that Father Bobby is all that stands between them and that."


It's true not only within the church, but within the culture as a whole these days, the complete erosion of trust as people shy away from the possibility of healthy relationships (such as a mentorship) out of a very real fear of having one's life ruined at the whim of the malignant. Good is called evil, and evil, good. Innocents suffer, the guilty prosper, and the amputation of man from God continues apace.

Anonymous said...

As 13 year old I freely rode my aunts 10sp bicycle all over the San Gabriel area, alone. My home was Ohio. I briefly raised eyebrows when I told them I'd gone into South Pas. But no big deal. Right back on the bike the next day to see the LA arboretum. I freely rode BART alone the next year during that summer vacation.

A common observation amongst boomers (regardless of belief) is how tightly leashed today's kids are. In my own exurban area parents drive their kids the 100 yards home from the school bus stop every day.

I'd think people would've noticed that the national crime rate for almost everything, has actually dropped back down to pre-1970 levels. I'm a fan of the theory that most American citizens have been conditioned, by whatever powers that be.

julie said...

When you were young, Anon, it was normal for kids to roam. Lots of kids, all over the place, running errands for mom at the corner store, waiting in the car, etc. It was also normal for there to be a corresponding mom in most houses, keeping an eye out the window and an ear out for anything that needed parental intervention. They knew everybody in the neighborhood, and which kids were trouble. People watched out for each other.

When I was young, it was normal for a lot of kids to come home to empty houses because both parents worked. Kids still wandered freely, but not as many and not as much. Remember "latchkey kids"? You don't hear that term anymore. Those kids grew up; they knew what it was like to be on their own while the parents worked. If something bad happened, they were literally on their own. Today, they work, too, because now it's normal for both parents to work to support their kids; or maybe they're divorced, so they have to juggle custody. Whatever the circumstances, mostly they aren't home all day. Instead of leaving the kids home alone, they put them in activities. Lots and lots of activities.

So if you happen to be a family where mom stays home and lets the kids be kids, it is really difficult to let them go wandering on their own. It's not normal anymore; no other moms are keeping an eye and ear out the window while the neighborhood kids play up and down the street. Someone sees a ten year old out exploring, they're liable to call the cops or CPS. And honestly, I have to think part of the reason there's less crime is that kids - both the easy victims and the troublemakers - aren't out wandering unsupervised all the time.

Not everybody made it through those halcyon days unscathed.

Anonymous said...

My local sheriff tells us that most crime is about the drug addiction. When I asked for a profile, he said that falling in with the wrong crowd was mostly what does kids in. So I guess score one for lots and lots of kid activities. Still, I think a combination of unresolved trauma + temperament is at least equally important.

There’s a downside to any extreme, probably because humans have such a wide spread of inborn temperaments. What works for one type of kid might be detrimental to another. Childhood freedom worked for me, helped me be more self-reliant and confident than more 'forced' situations might have (I was a highly agreeable very tiny bookish kid). But other kids... maybe not so much. In a theoretical best fit society I’d think that kids running around loose, and kids goose stepping with the soccer team, would all be just fine as long as the outcome was managed to be as civilized as possible. They give kids aptitude tests. Why not temperamental?

Of course maintaining a high quality of enforcement has always been difficult for humanity. But there have been some times better than others. Maybe we could learn from them. IMHO, it becomes all about who we allow into any position of power... how the mob manages power to manage the mob. And so fewer priests might molest or be wrongly smeared.

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