Man, Superman, and Inframan

Another post I hesitate to recommend...

Last night I was watching a video on Nietzsche by a philosophy professor. Then this morning, while rummaging around in the arkive, I found this old post written after rereading Thus Spake Zarathustra, which I hadn't looked at in some 40 years.

My avowed purpose was to revisit ground zero of modern bonehead atheism, although Nietzsche himself was no bonehead, rather, a clever and witty anti-theist who was also honest enough to draw out the implications of his philosophy all the way to the madhouse, so give him credit for ruthless consistency. 

At the age of 30, Zarathustra leaves home and goes off to the mountains in order to think. Eventually he wearies of being alone with his wisdom, so he deicides to go down into the world and share the news, which is neither good nor bad (since there can be no transcendent standard), but rather (like nature), simply is. 

The first person Zarathustra encounters on the way down is an old saint. I suppose this sets the pattern of people who aren't particularly congenial to his message of liberation from God (or from any other form of transcendence). Afterwards Zarathustra is astonished, saying to himself,

"Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!"

Then he wanders into town, where he again gets the cold shoulder, even though, hey, "I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed." And just "What have ye done to surpass man?" 

For Superman is to man as man is to ape; and the latter is

a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.

But almost nobody qualifies for the title of Superman, since mankind at large is literally a kind of contemptible disease:

The earth, said he, hath a skin; and this skin hath diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called "man."

Nor did Zarathustra have any use for liberalism or progressivism -- unless it is the individual progress from man to Superman. The Superman categorically rejects Christian holdovers such as equality and justice, regarding them as disguises for weakness, envy, and vengeance: 

ye preachers of equality! Tarantulas are ye unto me, and secretly revengeful ones!

But I will soon bring your hiding-places to the light.... Therefore do I tear at your web, that your rage may lure you out of your den of lies, and that your revenge may leap forth from behind your word "justice"....

[Y]our most secret tyrant-longings disguise themselves thus in virtue-words! Fretted conceit and suppressed envy... in you break they forth as flame and frenzy of vengeance.

He also nails the media, and good on him:

Just see these superfluous ones! Sick they are always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper.

Not to mention the state, which is  

the coldest of all cold monsters.... Destroyers are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state.... whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath it hath stolen....

True enough. So, who exactly benefits from this cold leviathan monster? The usual excess and useless people: 

Many too many are born: for the superfluous ones was the state devised!

Certainly true of the modern state, which, in addition to pandering to the superfluous, is itself the employer of last resort for millions of otherwise useless people. 

Nevertheless, I don't see how Nietzsche's vision works in practice -- a handful of Supermen riding roughshod over the restavus useless drones. But I am by no means a Nietzsche expert. I was just an adolescent dabbler and Superman wannabe. Maybe I should watch the rest of the video. 

Why is Nietzsche so popular despite the fact that few of his readers would make the cut and qualify as a ruthless Supermen? Kreeft describes five different kinds of reader, from those who dismiss him as crazy, to teenage rebels, to deconstructionists who enlist him into their clever-silly language games. 

Kreeft takes him as a kind of prophet "with a valuable warning to our entire culture," what with its evident "will to power" in the wake of the vacuum left by the (practically speaking) death of God. 

Speaking of which (and back to the present), I'm reading a book by Henri Renard called The Philosophy of God. It's another one of those "introductory" texts from 75 years ago, when folks were smarter. I won't say there were more supermen back then, but certainly there were more men aware of what transcends man.

Nietzsche is usually lumped in with the existentialists, but it says here that "The philosophy of St. Thomas is the only philosophy that is truly existential," so somebody's wrong. And someone is not as super as he thinks he is. After all, the prefix "super-" literally means

over and above: higher in quality, quantity, or degree; exceeding a norm; surpassing all or most others of its kind or class; having an additional dimension; constituting a more inclusive category.

Like a saint or something? 

As for Nietzsche, I don't see how someone can be called "super" while simultaneously being plunged back into immanent nature. Rather, the latter seems more deserving of the prefix "infra-." 

Is Thomas above Nietzsche, or is it the other way around? Recall that, on his way down from the mountain, Nietzsche bumps into an old saint. Too bad it wasn't Thomas, for perhaps he could have straightened him out about the death of God business. Because for Thomistic existentialism,

nothing is intelligible, nothing is, except as immediately from Him who is the "To Be." 

Without this "Subsisting 'To Be,'" there is "no satisfactory solution" to a host of various problems, man himself being among the biggest ones. I think Thomas would agree that there is something not-so-super about man, even though this is a deviation from the original plan.

On the one hand, "Education results largely from constant contact with great minds" -- with superminds, I suppose we might say. But "The error of the Modernists" -- Nietzsche among them -- "is that they reject any objective demonstration of the existence of God." 

Nietzsche dismisses any such talk of God as so much sentimental twaddle resulting from a slave mentality, but you heard the man -- he just referred to a rigorously objective demonstration of God's existence that doesn't care about feelings -- Nietzsche's or anyone else's. 

I'm with Thomas, who "proclaims and establishes that the intellect of man in its most perfect [super!] action is able to reach objective reality and know the true." 

Superman or dead man? For Thomas, any form of subjectivism "is intellectual suicide," hardly the means of surpassing man and attaining the Superman.

It's getting late, so here is a super summary of how we are able to attain real transcendence in five easy steps:

1) Being is intelligible.

2) Knowledge is caused by the object.

3) The intellect is a spiritual faculty whose adequate object is being.

4) The principle of causality flows from a knowledge of being and made certain by metaphysical analysis.

5) From a knowledge of the effects we are able to rise to certain knowledge of the cause which is God.

Are we not supermen? Or just men ordered to that which we know darn well is superior to us? More to follow...