The God-Free Zone

This post is probably a fail, but I tried, goddammit, I sure as hell did that much now, didn't I? 

I also tried reading a newish biography of Nietzsche called I Am Dynamite, but it was more of a dud. Couldn't get through it. 

I just don't understand the fuss. If this is philosophy, then I'm not interested in philosophy. But I am interested in philosophy, so what is Nietzsche actually doing when he thinks he's philosophizing? Schuon didn't often name names, but I wonder if he had Nietzsche in mind in the following passage:

Skeptical rationalism and titanesque naturalism are the two great abuses of intelligence, which violate pure intellectuality as well as the sense of the sacred; it is through this propensity that thinkers “are wise in their own eyes” and end by “calling evil good, and good evil” and by “putting darkness for light, and light for darkness”; they are also the ones who, on the plane of life or experience, “make bitter what is sweet,” namely the love of the eternal God, and “sweet what is bitter,” namely the illusion of the evanescent world.

Neitzsche was by no means rational, but clearly into T.N. But if man is only natural, whence the titan? It seems like the fall of man elevated to the highest wisdom.   

Called it: "On the whole, modern philosophy is the codification of an acquired infirmity," which is to say, "the intellectual atrophy of man marked by the fall.” 

Nietzsche is very much a critical philosopher. Indeed, he philosophized with a hammer and critiqued with dynamite. But

If the normal functioning of the intelligence has to be subjected to a critique, then the criticizing consciousness has to be subjected to a critique in its turn by asking, “what is it that thinks?” and so forth -- a play of mirrors whose very inconclusiveness demonstrates its absurdity....  

[A] thought that is “criticist” is in contradiction with its own existence. A subject who casts doubt on man’s normal subjectivity thereby casts doubt upon his own doubting; and this is just what has happened to critical philosophy, swept away in its turn, and through its own fault, by existentialism in all its forms.

Relativism creates an infinite regress with no ground or basis for thinking as such. If this is normal, then there is no such thing as normality, let alone the trans-normality of the Übermensch.  

What then is normal subjectivity and normal functioning of the intelligence? Well, a normal subjectivity is not far from how Freud, of all people, described it: one capable of work, love, and play. And a normal intelligence must be one ordered to reality and therefore truth. But if truth is subjective and relative, then there is no standard of normality, and everyone's abnormal.  

Which is no doubt a kind of perverse consolation to the abnormal. 

[A]ll anti-intellectual philosophy falls into this trap: it claims, for example, that there is only the subjective and the relative, without taking account of the fact that this is an assertion which, as such, is valid only on condition that it is itself neither subjective nor relative, for otherwise there would no longer be any difference between correct perception and illusion, or between truth and error.... 

[I]f everything is relative -- in a sense which excludes all reflection of absoluteness in the world -- then the definition of relativity is equally relative, absolutely relative, and our definition has no meaning. Relativists of all kinds -- the “existentialist” and “vitalist” defenders of the infra-rational -- have then no excuse for their bad habits of thought.

Gemini, did Nietzsche ever mention Meister Eckhart? 

It's complex to give a simple "yes" or "no" to whether Nietzsche "mentioned" Meister Eckhart, as the relationship between their thought is more about potential resonances and interpretations. 

However, there are scholarly discussions that draw parallels between aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy and Meister Eckhart's mysticism, for example, the emphasis on inner experience and self-overcoming, and notions of "nothingness" and the transcendence of conventional values.

However,

It's important to note that while there might be shared themes, Nietzsche's overall philosophical project was very different from Eckhart's. Nietzsche was famously critical of Christianity, whereas Eckhart was a Christian mystic.

I bring up Eckhart because he famously prayed for God "to rid me of God," i.e., to rid himself of finite or created images as opposed to an experience of the infinite and unconditioned reality. He would agree with Nietzsche that God is nothing, but this doesn't imply that nothing is God, for

God is nothingness and yet God is something. God is neither this thing nor that thing that we can express, God is beyond all being. God is a beingless being.

Straight-up orthoparadox:

God is a being beyond being and and a nothingness beyond being.  

Now, in the previous post we were discussing the one place from which God withdraws in order to leave some breathing room for creatures. This reminds me of the kabbalistic doctrine of tsimtsum, whereby "the existence of the universe is made possible by a process of shrinkage in God" (Scholem). For 

How can there be a world if God is everywhere? If God is "all in all," how can there be things which are not God? 

One might say that the Big Bang of creation is accompanied by a Big Contraction of the Creator. Sure, it's a heretical idea, but it seems that God doesn't just create from nothing, but must create the nothing from which he creates, otherwise there can be no genuine freedom on our end. 

Now, according to existentialists such as Sartre, our freedom is indeed nothingness, full stop. Because consciousness is not determined by any fixed essence, it is free to choose its own being. Thus his famous crack that man is "condemned to be free," because we, not God, are responsible for creating ourselves by our own choices and actions. But since existence precedes essence, there can be no objective meaning or purpose, so it's all a pointless exercise in applied nihilism.

Nevertheless, there is something to the linkage of freedom and nothingness, since freedom is a kind of subjective vacuum, so to speak: one can do this or one can do that, but on what basis? Let's ask Schuon:

The purpose of freedom is to enable us to choose what we are in the depths of our heart. We are intrinsically free to the extent that we have a center which frees us: a center which, far from confining us, dilates us by offering us an inward space without limits and without shadows; and this Center is in the last analysis the only one there is.

This dilating center must be the true Slack, but that's a subject for a different post. 

One might say that in anthropogenesis, something becomes nothing that nothing may become something. Or, we have fallen into a bad nothingness from which God's rescue operation is designed to free us: to free us from the misuse of freedom? To lift us from Nietzsche's bad nothing to Eckhart's good nothing? 

It certainly seems that nothingness cuts both ways, implying on the one hand "the 'absence' of being" or "of determinate things." On the other hand, "this idea can also be applied, quite paradoxically, to the transcendent or principial order," where "all that transcends this world... is free from existential limitations, is 'nothingness.'"

You're rambling. What does this have to do with anything, let alone everything?

Well, because we are created free, we are free to rebel against our creator, from nothing to nothingness, or to become less than nothing, as it were. As Boyd describes it, "the possibility of abusing freedom had to exist in order for the possibility of using it correctly to exist." Along these lines, he quotes C.S. Lewis:

Free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give [creatures] free will? 

Because it "is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having." 

So, if the prime directive is Love Freely Chosen -- to which I would add Truth Freely Known and Beauty Freely Created -- then we just have to put up with people like Nietzsche and Sartre who have not chosen wisely, and prefer a barren nothingness to the radiant and bountiful nothingness of God?

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me?