PART I: BACKGROUND
1. Nietzsche's Life as Background of His Thought
1) 1872-76 - Early works dealing with the problem of values (Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations)
2) 1876-82 - Psychological Inquiries leading to the Discovery of the Will to Power (Human All-too-Human, Dawn, Gay Science, Zarathustra)
3) 1882-88 - Return to value problem (Zarathustra on...)
4) 1889 = insane. 1888 was not insanity but free expression. Ecce Homo attests to his vitriolic denunciation of any Darwinistic construction of the overman, of racism, of German nationalism (56). After the collapse in the street, then everything starts to go downhill. Cannot get rid of any of N's works by referring to madness. Notes collected in "The Will to Power" are suggestive and interesting, but far overvalued as a result of his sister's propagandizing.
2. Nietzsche's Method
a) Aphorisms: we are confronted with a "pluralistic universe" in which each aphorism is itself a microcosm (62)
b) Style of Decadence: used to style of decadence to overcome Wagner's decadence (65).
c) Anti-system: N did not like systems because they could not question their own basis and thus limited critique. Building systems is childish. In the end, systems are good for the man who uses them intelligently, but bad for the philosopher who artificially imprisons his thought in one of them (67). N, like Plato, is not a system-thinker but a problem thinker (68). Whereas Hegel sought to say that all past systems are in part true, N had no love for all past systems (70).
d) Scientific Experimentalism: N's experimentalism -> philosopher must be willing to experiment. N wanted to be more scientific like Hegel, but his was not improved rigorousness of a system but the fearless experimentation of gay science (71).
e) Existentialism: To Hegel, N would say his questions are too abstract. Only problems which present themselves so forcefully that they threaten the thinker's present mode of life lead to philosophic inquiries -> existentialism. Necessity of "living through" problems. Convictions are only ways to make more hypotheses.
3. The Death of God and the Revaluation
In the parable of the madman (Gay Science), N imagines himself mad, having lost God (81). N wants to imagine the death of God not just as metaphysic speculation but as a diagnosis of contemporary civilization (84). "To escape nihilism - which sees involved both in asserting the existence of God and thus robbing this world of ultimate significance, and also in denying God and thus robbing everything of meaning and value - that is N's greatest and most persistent problem" (86). What is needed: a revaluation of all values.
Kant always assumed the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori, while N wanted to question precisely the value of those a priori judgments. Kant and Hegel are merely servants and laborers; N is a value-legislator (91). Philosopher is a surgeon (92).
N does not provide us with a comprehensive list of values, but he does praise honesty, courage, generosity, politeness and integrity. Really, revaluation means war against accepted valuations, not the creation of new ones (93). "The revaluation is the discovery that our morality is, by its own standards, poisonously immoral: that Christian love is the mimicry of impotent hatred; that most unselfishness is but a particularly vicious form of selfishness; and that ressentiment is at the core of our morals" (96).
PART II: THE DEVELOPMENT OF N'S THOUGHT
4. Art and History
Crown of N's philosophy: overman and eternal recurrence. Key conception: will to power. Primary concern: values. What does nihilism mean? That the highest values disvalue themselves (103).
Birth of Tragedy (1872): The object of attack in N's early works is the State (103). In the Birth of Tragedy, only as an aesthetic phenomenon is life and the world justified eternally (104). In Schelling's later "positive" philosophy, he worried about the "ultimate despair" of the individual, which would interest both K and N. But N is closer to the Enlightenment than Schelling and K, who emphasize a leap into revealed religion (106). Key concepts in Birth of Tragedy are Apollinian (harmony, beauty, individuation) and Dionysian (drunken frenzy that destroys all forms). Culture is a contest between two violently opposed forces. The later Dionysus in N's work is a synthesis of Dionysus and Apollo from the Birth of Tragedy. N claims sickness as one of the great stimulants of life. Health is for him not an accidental lack of infection but the ability to overcome disease (111).
First Meditation - David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer (1873): "The typical mediocrity, however, which most provokes N is the comfortable and untroubled renunciation of Christianity, coupled with an easy conviction that Darwin was one of mankind's greatest benefactors" (115). "The problem of the old faith and the new, the challenge of Darwin, and the sanction and derivation of moral values: these are the themes of most of N's later works" (116).
Second Meditation - On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874): Three key concepts are historical, unhistorical and suprahistorical (122). The study of history does not make us happy. "The unhistorical and the historical are needed equally for the health of an individual, a people and a culture" (123). Both are necessary, forgetting and remembering. What about suprahistorical? Historical man has faith in the future. The suprahistorical man is the one "who does not envisage salvation in the process but for whom the world is finished in every single moment and its end attained. What could ten new years teach that the past could not teach?" (125). N specifically disagrees with the optimism of the Hegelians and the Darwinists. Empirical history not one of progress. The goal of humanity cannot lie in the end but only in its highest specimens (127). If man's value is zero, adding zeros won't add to his value. What comes later is not necessarily more valuable. The gulf which separates Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee (128). History is not a process but a timeless allegory. Historical events are looked to less with an eye to literal accuracy or correctness than to circumscribe an everyday melody, to elevate it, to intensify it into a comprehensive symbol of a timeless theme (130).
5. Existenz versus the State, Darwin and Rousseau
Third Meditation - Schopenhauer as Educator (1874): The consummation of N's early philosophy. Implicit distinction between man's true nature and man's nature (134). Man's fundamental problem is to achieve a true "existence" instead of letting his life be no more than just another accident. How does one become what one is? The State is depreciated here for preventing man from realizing himself. N in fact opposes any overestimation of the political. "The kingdom of God is in the hearts of men - and N accuses Christianity of having betrayed this fundamental insight from the beginning, whether by transferring the kingdom into another world, and thus depreciating this life, or by becoming political and seeking salvation through organizations, churches, cults, sacraments or priests" (141). Salvation is a question for the single one. N was woken from his dogmatic slumber by Darwin like Kant was by Hume. If we canot discover a new picture of man which will again give him a sense of essential dignity, the State will, in the hands of military despots (142).
Three conceptions of man: 1) Rousseau urges revolution and a return to nature. 2) Goethe's calm antithesis to the youthful cult of Rousseau's gospel. 3) Schopenhauer. This essay could have been called on the Use and Abuse of the Apollinian and the Dionysian (144). Rousseau = Dionysus. Three criticisms of Rousseau: 1) he contributed to formation of modern State, 2) against brotherhood of man, pro-individuation, 3) no return to nature, but to improve nature. Here N's the aim of culture and nature are the same: the aim of culture is the perfection of nature (147). Man must help nature work at its own perfection. N's early attempt at solving value problem breaks down when he cannot determine what specimens are the most valuable. How can he defend his assumption that artist, saint and philosophers are the highest forms of life? (152). The dichotomy between the two selves, an empirical self and a "true self," reappears in N's account of nature.
6. The Discovery of the Will to Power
With the discovery of the will to power, N's early dualistic tendencies reduced to manifestations of this basic drive. A reconciliation was finally effected between Dionysus and Apollo, nature and value, wastefulness and purpose, empirical and true self, and physis and culture (152). Life is not a struggle for survival but a will to power.
Will to power first appears in the late 1870's as one of two psychological phenomena: fear (negative) and will to power (positive). In the psychological studies Human All-too-Human and Dawn, he shows how valuations are rationalizations of more basic interests. Gratitude is a mild form of revenge, for instance. To want pity is to want others to suffer with us. Even apparent negations of the will to power are the will to power. Power is enjoyed only as more power. One enjoys not its possession but its increase: the overcoming of impotence (159). Eventually he decides fear is just the negative aspect of the will to power. Dawn is the final dress rehearsal for the will to power, The Gay Science for the eternal recurrence, and Zarasthustra their first performance. When N finally realized the Greeks were driven by the will to power, he completed his transition to monism. The will to power fro then on is envisaged as the basic drive of all human efforts (166). Both the weak and the powerful are imbued with the will to power, though they obviously manifest it in very different ways. "Qualitative differences between various modes of power are reducible to more basic quantitative differences; rationality is taken to be the mark of great power; and with this crucial "qualification," the quantitative degree of power is the measure of value" (173). The will to power is essentially the will to overcome oneself. In so defining it, N has to again rely on a distinction between power and true power, between Rousseau's nature and true nature. Philosophy is the most spiritual will to power, as evidenced by Hegel's "Gothic heaven-storming." But unlike Hegel, N did not think the world was ever quite so knowable. Later N will say that the will to power is not just self-overcoming but the basic principle of all life.
PART III: NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY OF POWER
7. Morality and Sublimation
Self-criticism is the core of man's morality; wherever he is found, he imposes restraints on himself. In terms of his early work, N might have said that reason needs to take control of the will to power, Apollo taking control of Dionysus. But now there is nothing but the will to power, so it must overcome itself (185). The process and control of the will to power that is not simply its rejection N calls sublimation. It was N who gave sublimation the meaning it has today. Sublimation could include substitute satisfactions, implanting regularity in the drive, generating oversaturation and disgust, associating it with an agonizing thought or dislocating its force. But it cannot include self-exhaustion or self-mortification. "This contrast of the abnegation, repudiation and extirpation of the passions on the one side, and their control and sublimation on the other, is one of the most important points in N's entire philosophy" (193). A man without impulses could not do good nor create the beautiful any more than a castrated man could beget children. He despises Christianity for suppressing rather than attempting to sublimate the drives. W can now understand what the early N meant by "organizing the chaos" and "transfigured physis" (196).
8. Sublimation, Geist, and Eros
N often used sublimation alongside spiritualization (Vergeistigung). After the discovery of the will to power, reason/spirit as well as our passions are both its derivatives. Rationality gives man mastery over himself and as the will to power is essentially the instinct of freedom (198). Reason is the "highest" manifestation of the will to power, in the distinct sense that through rationality it can realize its objective most fully. Reason gives us the skills to develop foresight and to give consideration to all the impulses, to organize their chaos, to integrate them into a harmony - and thus to give man power: power over himself and over nature (199). His attack on systems is based on the objection to the irrationality which he finds in the failure to question premises. Philosophy is the most spiritual will to power, and the spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity. The truly rational man need not go to war against his impulses (203). The will to power is thus neither identical with reason nor opposed to it, but potentially rational.
N was a dialectical monist: like Hegel, he found a single word to epitomize the entire dialectic. Like Hegel's aufheben, N's sublimation is a simultaneous preserving, canceling and lifting up. Sublimation is possible only because there is a basic force (the will to power) which is defined in terms of an objective (power) which remains the same throughout all "metamorphoses." It is the very essence of the will to power to manifest itself in one way and then to sublimate its manifestations. Both Hegel and N rejected any monism that could not explain diversity better than Thales' principle of water. N's will to power differs from Schopenhauer's will, much as Hegel's Absolute differs from that of his predecessors, Schelling's, in particular (206). Both Hegel and N postulated a single basic force whose very essence it is to manifest itself in diverse ways and to create multiplicity - not ex nihilo, but out of itself (207). "The will to power is always at war with itself. The battle between reason and impulse is only one of countless skirmishes. All natural events, all history, and the development of every human being, consist in a series of such contests: all that exists strives to transcend itself and is thus engaged in a fight against itself. The acorn strives to become an oak tree, though this involves its ceasing to be an acorn and, to that extent, self-overcoming" (209). Differences with Hegel: 1) N more concerned with individual states of mind, 2) N more willing to emphasize suffering and cruelty, stressing the painful aspect of self-overcoming.
N called his principle the will to power rather than the instinct of freedom to emphasize that all living creatures strive to enhance themselves, to generate more life, not simply to exist freely. Both Freud and N preferred terms that shocked people, sex and power. But N was no more endorsing the will to power wholesale than Freud was endorsing sex.
It is of the very essence of the living that it denies itself the gratification of some of its impulses, even that it sacrifices life itself, for more life and power. The will to power is more important than the will to life. The powerful man is the creative man; but the creator is not likely to abide by previously established laws. Every creation is a creation of new norms (217). Great power reveals itself in great self-mastery. It is thus weakness either to give in to one's impulses and to be arbitrary and wild or to resort to the extirpation of the impulses. The asceticism of powerful men consists in the sublimation of their impulses, in the organization of the chaos of their passions, and in man's giving "style" to his own character (219).
9. Power versus Pleasure
Happiness is elastic, men can gain it in many ways. Happiness is not pleasure but power. Pleasure is coextensive with consciousness, while power does not necessarily require any conscious state or feeling. The striving for pleasure is simple an epiphenomenon of the will to power. The will to power is neither a being nor a becoming, but a pathos - it is the most fundamental fact from which becoming and affecting result (228). Hume is right that only habit leads us to causality. The alleged instinct for causality is merely the fear of the unaccustomed and the attempt to discover in it something that we are acquainted with - a search not for causes, but for what we are acquainted with (229).
In short, man by nature strives for something to which pleasure and pain are only incidental. What distinguishes N from Christianity is his naturalistic denial of the breach between flesh and spirit, his claim that self-sacrifice is the very essence of life, and his paradoxical assertion that man's attempts to sublimate his animal nature exemplify the very way of nature (235). He asserted that spirit cuts into life, and that is is its function to counteract man's tendency to yield to his impulses; but he considered it an instrument which life uses in its effort to enhance itself. Joy and pain are not opposites...whoever wants as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other. True happiness is the fusion of power and joy - and joy contains not only the ingredients of pleasure but also a component of pain. When the overcoming of suffering is not conceived in terms of one's own exertions, it is apt to take the form of one's own triumphant elevation over the suffering of others (239). Worldly power may clock the most abysmal weakness. At the top of the power scale are those who are able to sublimate their impulses, to organize their chaos and to give style to their character (243). The good man for Nietzsche is the passionate man who is the master of his passions. The apotheosis of joy = amor fati. He knows it when he says Yes to his own being and affirms the rest of the world in the process. Any affirmation of the present moment points far beyond the present. "My formula for the greatness of a human being is amor fati: that one would not have anything different - not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. No only to bear the necessary, even less to conceal it...but to love it" (246).
10. The Master Race
N looked to art, philosophy and religion - and not to race - to elevate man above the beasts. N did not join in with his contemporaries in developing the modern Nordic version of the master-race myth, like Wagner, Gobineau and Forster. He called anti-semitism "literary obscenity." N believed in Lamarckism and race mixture. He did hold up the Greeks as "the model of a race and culture that has become pure," i.e. a people who possessed the Apollinian power to organize the Dionysian chaos. Just because N attacked slave morality does not mean he identified with the masters (256). He always considered racism a maze of lies.
11. Overman and Eternal Recurrence
N's philosophy culminates in the dual vision of the overman and the eternal recurrence. Man is something that should be overcome in over-fullness, over-goodness, over-time, over-kind, over-wealth, over-hero, over-drinking (268). Man is a rope tied between beast and overman. Procreation need not be a senseless continuation of an essentially meaningless story and marriage can serve this purpose. The overman is the one who has transfigured his physis and acquired self-mastery (270). N repudiates the modern notion of progress in the very same breath in which he speaks of the overman - to say that he has existed many times in the past. Eternal recurrence like the supra-historical perspective, where one "does not envisage salvation in the process but...the world is finished in every single moment and its end attained" (276). It depends on N's denial of indefinite progress - of what Hegel called the bad infinite - and they suggest the possible infinite value of the moment and the individual (276). The overman would also realize how inextricably his own being was involved in the totality of the cosmos: and in affirming his own being, he would also affirm all that is, has been, or will be. The doctrine of the eternal recurrence is the most extreme repudiation of any deprecation of the moment, the finite, and the individual - the antithesis of any faith which pins its hopes on infinite progress. "I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of other-worldly hopes" (277). The eternal recurrence was less an idea than an experience - the supreme experience of a life unusually rich in suffering, pain and agony. "Not only to bear the necessary, even less to conceal it...but to love it" (279). The eternal recurrence means that all events are repeated endlessly, that there is no plan nor goal to give meaning to history or life, and that we are mere puppets in an absolutely senseless play (282). This is a synthesis of Heraclitus and Parmenides, of the dynamic and static world pictures, of being and becoming. Development is not a line but a circle which returns into itself (285).
PART IV: SYNOPSIS
12. Nietzsche's Repudiation of Christ
N distinguished both between contemporary Christianity and the original gospel, and between Jesus and Christ. More than anything he was interested in the psychology of Jesus. His true message has been twisted by the church: "What are the glad tidings? True life, eternal life has been found - it is not promised, it is here, it is in you: as a living in love, in love without subtraction and exclusion, without regard for station" (290). In contrast to Jesus the person, N completely repudiated Christ as the glorification of Jesus.
Faith v. Action: For N, Paul was the first Christian, who discovered faith as a remedy against the incapacity for what one deems to be right action (294). Escape and revenge -> faith, the most incredible inversion of the gospel. Paul made it possible for these resentful people to call themselves Christians. Jesus wanted people to become perfect here and now, and instead they put their trust in a distant future. The disvaluation of the secular leads to obedience to the State, which N also hated. In short, faith takes the place of action: instead of perfecting oneself, one has faith that Christ was perfect - and meanwhile there is a church which, instead of insisting that man leave father and mother and break with conformity, insists that man conform to the church in matters of faith and to the state in matters of action (296). Paul even pronounced charity is the greatest of faith, hope and charity, but Luther insisted on faith.
Faith v. Reason: Luther said "whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason" (300). N opposes any doctrine of double truth. Faith means a partial paralysis of reason. One should not have faith in one's convictions; courage is rather a matter of attacking one's convictions (303). The will to truth is clearly a Christian, moral, metaphysical faith, but it also spells the end of Christianity. When N describes the will to truth as a principle which is hostile to life and destructive, he is entirely consistent with his emphatic and fundamental assertion that man wants power more than life (308). Truth is power, untruth is weakness. As a devotee of truth, N rejects the Christian faith as incompatible with the moral demands of this vocation.
N concentrated his praise on friendship and repudiated neighbor-love and pity. His criticism of the Christian faith is of its weakness, how it avoids self-perfection and makes one flee from oneself. Pity does not help anyone toward self-perfection. In friendship, on the other hand, two people have a common thirst for a higher ideal. N thus renounced Christian love for Greek friendship. The best that a friend can do is to help him gain self-mastery. Pity, on the other hand, is our bad love of ourselves. In pity, the world becomes a large hospital and each will becomes the other's humane nurse.
The motive of Christian virtue = ressentiment (319). "I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws" (319). The difference between N's ethics and what he himself took to be Christian ethics is not ultimately reducible to different forms of behavior or divergent tables of virtues: it revolves primarily around the agent's state of mind or, yet more basically, his state of being" (321). Its the difference between someone who acts from the overfullness of life vs. the impoverishment of life. Christian morality, romanticism, anarchism, anti-semitism are all expressions of ressentiment.
Goethe was N's model of the "new barbarian," the overman with the Dionysian faith (325). N agreed with Goethe that romanticism is egoism + weakness. N agrees with Aristotle, who wrote "the good man ought to be a lover of self, since he will then act nobly, and so both benefit himself and aid his fellows; but the bad man ought not to be a lover of self, since he will follow his base passions, and so injure both himself and his neighbors" (327). Sickness, dearth and ressentiment = modern man, romanticism, Christianity.
13. Nietzsche's Admiration for Socrates
Socrates is celebrated as the first philosopher of life. Wisdom consists in seeing the limitations of one's own knowledge. Socrates considered it his mission to be a gadfly on the neck of man. Life without inquiries is no life. "Socrates, to confess it frankly, is so close to me that almost always I fight a fight against him" (340). Socrates is the highest ideal, a passionate man who can control his passions. The model philosopher is a physician, but the gadfly has turned into a vivesectionist. In an age in which there was nobility which deemed itself superior without living up to its exalted self-conception, one could emphasize equality. But today, equality is confused with conformity. Men today nurture a ressentiment against all that is distinguished, superior and strange (346).
My formula for the greatness of a human being is amor fati: that one would not have anything different - not forward, not backward, not in all eternity (348). The rebirth of Dionysus seemed to N a reaffirmation of life as "indestructible, powerful and joyous," in spite of suffering and death, while he construed the crucifixion as a "curse on life" (351). Goethe v. Christ, Dionysus v. the Crucified.
Epilogue
N opposed both the idolatry of the state and political liberalism because he was basically anti-political. It is sometimes as if he was swimming against the stream for its own sake. N desired to live for one's education free from politics, nationality and newspapers (357).
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Nietzsche, Friedrich - The Gay Science, Preface, Book V
Preface
In the preface Nietzsche explains the meaning of the "Gay Science." I will merely cite his explanation so as not to prejudice our understanding of this difficult work: "Gay Science": that signifies that saturnalia of a spirit who patiently resisted a terrible, long pressure - patiently, severely , coldly, without submitting, but also without hope - and who is now all at once attacked by hope, the hope for health, and the intoxication of convalescence...This whole book is nothing but a bit of merry-making after a long privation and powerlessness, the rejoicing of strength that is returning, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that are open again, of goals that are permitted again, believed again." (32)
It is evident though that Nietzsche see himself as articulating a perspective that is almost stoically realistic at the same time as it is joyous and characterized by the affirmation of life. Indeed, in the Preface, Nietzsche also offers a short criticism of philosophical and religious thinkers whose thought is characterized by the denial, or negation, of life along with the search for some transcendent "Apart, Beyond, Outside." Nietzsche, strikingly similar to William James, maintains that this search has more to do with psychological needs, in particular relief from a particular form of suffering, than with any 'objective' philosophical requirements. Nietzsche, thus, embodies philosophy, removing the distance between a philosophers 'thought' and his all too physical life. He writes "I have asked myself whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body." Importantly, Nietzsche points this out not reveal the biases of previous philosophers and get on with 'objective' philosophy. Rather, it seems that he thinks that philosophy will always be thus embodied, but that previous philosophers were suffering from a particular affliction and pursued a particular cure. A cure that Nietzsche thinks does not actually restore health. Seemingly speaking about himself, he writes that: "I am still waiting for a philosophical physician in the exceptional sense of the word - one who has to pursue that problem of the total health of a people, time, race of humanity." (35) The job of this philosophical physician is both to reveal the true embodied character of the thought of previous times and to articulate new health-restoring thoughts. Nietzsche believes that his own time of sickness, of gloominess and near-despair, allows him to articulate thoughts that are truly joyous, full of the affirmation of life, or gaiety. A crucial component of the recovery of this affirmation of life is the realization that the 'will to truth,' the desire for truth at all costs is a form of sickness. Instead, Nietzsche believes that a certain concern with sensuality and superficiality, out of profundity, is necessary. This view has interesting implications for his thoughts about historicism and religion.
Book V: We Fearless Ones
Nietzsche begins this chapter by explaining his declaration that "God is dead" as that "the Christian God has become unbelievable."
He believes that his undermines European's "ancient and profound trust" turning it into doubt. Furthermore, it serves to bring down European morality, which had been based upon it. Nietzsche maintains, however, that this is not a cause of gloominess or despair, rather for philosophers and 'free spirits" like himself it is cause of cheerfulness, amazement, and expectation.
Nietzsche, then, explore the complex relationship of science to personal convictions. On the one hand, convictions are only admissible in science if they give up being convictions and become hypotheses, subject to verification. On the other hand, science itself rests on an unsupported conviction or faith. This is that "nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything has only second-rate value." (281) Nietzsche then explores whether this 'will to truth' stems from prudence or some sort of self-applied moral maxim. He quickly concludes that it cannot have its roots in prudence, as it is clear that often the 'will to truth' is harmful for others and oneself. Instead he argues that the 'will to truth' is derivative from a moral obligation not to deceive anyone. It includes the injunction not to even deceive oneself. Following from this, Nietzsche argues that the 'will to truth' like many other European moral inclinations has its roots in world negating Christian religion. Science thus is a metaphysical faith, one that affirms that value of the 'Truth' over all worldly goods. Thus, another interesting interplay develops in which the 'will to truth' destroys its own foundations by exposing the Christian God as a lie.
Nietzsche then discusses his approach to morality. He believes that part of the problem of past inquiries into morality was the scholars did not engage personally enough with the question. Instead, they merely struggled to provide foundations for generally accepted European-Christian morality. (Alasdair MacIntyre makes this point well in After Virtue, a work that is actually heavily indebted to Nietzsche for its criticisms). Previous thinkers have not engaged in a general critique of moral evaluation as such, nor have they explored the "history of the origins of these feelings and valuations." (284) Instead, they have criticized particular moral judgments. Or, if they embraced relativism, the have done so on the basis of the world-wide conflict among moral judgments. They have certainly not discussed the basic value of morality itself. According to Kaufmann, this means " question[ing] whether the effects of morality on those who are moral are beneficial." (285n16)
The question of whether morality is beneficial for man comes in connection with the realization that "God is dead." It has been revealed that the world itself is not rational, merciful or just. Thus shattering man's 'reverences.' Man is not something apart from the world as religion or rationalistic philosophy had maintained. He is under no obligation to divinely revealed or rationally imposed morality. Man is simply part of the world.
Nietzsche then discusses faith and the need for faith. According to him, faith or belief correlates with weakness. True fearlessness is the ability to face the absence of faith while still affirming life. More specifically, faith stems from a weakness of the will. When the will can no longer command, it desires someone else to command it. It does not have the strength or courage to act on its own command, so it needs to subject itself to someone's command. In contrast, Nietzsche puts forward his own ideal:"One could conceive of such pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities of dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence." (290)
Nietzsche then engages in an interesting exploration of the social origins of scholars that impact that their origins have on them.
I actually found his discussion of 'Jewish' habits of scholarship interesting and highly apt. He is not the only one to point out the distinct place of Jewish intellectuals in European culture, as both insiders and outsiders, builders and underminers. In particular, his point about logic and 'compelling agreement by force of reasons' can be illustrated though the example of his contemporary, Hermann Cohen. It is hard to deny that one of things that attracted Cohen to Kant was his rationalism and thus democratic aspect. It was certainly what Cohen did with neo-Kantianism.
Nietzsche now turns to a discussion of what is really fundamental instinct of life. He contests the then widely accepted scholarly claim that it is the preservation of life. He agues that the desire to preserve oneself is only a symptom of distress. The really fundamental instinct of life is the expansion of power. This desire to expand power takes risks with life, thus working against the instinct for self-preservation. "The great and small struggle always revolves around superiority, around growth and expansion, around power - in accordance with the will to power which is the will of life." (292)
Returning to religion, Nietzsche divides the religious personality into two types, which are similar to, though different from, James's once-born and twice-born souls. On the one hand, there are familiar, ingenuous, and superficial individuals. On the other hand, there a re graver, deeper, more meditative, 'evil,' and suspicious individuals. Nietzsche identifies the former with northern Europe and Protestantism and the later with southern Europe and Catholicism. He also sees the former as more democratic, in the negative leveling sense of the term. The later, suspicious of the nature of man, is more elitist. Protestantism is thus a 'peoples rebellion' against the elitism of the Catholicism.
Nietzsche then compares the ideal human type revered by the philosophers and the common people. The philosopher's ideal type is one "who lives and must live continually in the thundercloud of the highest problems and the heaviest responsibilities (by no means as an observer, outside, indifferent, secure, and objective). (293). The ideal type of the common people is the sage. He is quiet, serious, and simpleminded. The sage is a figure to which one can confess one's sins to and thus get rid of them. The sage has faith, wisdom, and thus certain knowledge. The philosopher despises the sage. Philosophers do not believe in men of certain knowledge. To be a philosopher is to love and thus seek after sophia, not to certainly possess it.
Nietzsche now moves to discuss morality more directly. According to him, moral discourse is means of covering the nakedness of European man. The European has become sickly. He is a herd animal of profound mediocrity, timidity and boredom. If he were health, a beast of prey, he would not need morality. Morality is way of covering of his weakness. It makes himlook more noble, important, respectable, and divine.
Nietzsche now shifts back to discuss the origin of religions. He claims that the founders of religion engage in a two stage process: 1) They posit a particular form of life that disciplines the will and abolishes boredom. 2)They bestow on this life style an interpretation that makes it valuable and worth fighting for. Nietzsche then argues that in fact the second stage is more important. Most of the time, founders of religion do not create a form of life ex nihlo. Rather, they take an existing form of life and reify it through the second stage. Thus, the distinctive skill of a founder of a religion is to be able to see a group of average people enmeshed in a type of life style and being able to get them to recognize themselves as a distinctive group - sharing something important - a religion.
Nietzsche then discusses self-consciousness and communication. Foreshadowing much of the thought of Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Brandom, Nietzsche argues that self-consciousness is not primary. Most of life would be possible without it. Rather, he argues that self-consciousness arises out of a need to communicate, the need to communicate distress to others. In order to communicate their distress, a human being needed to know what distresses him, how he feels, and what he thinks. Anticipating Freud as well, Nietzsche argues that much thought goes on in our thoughts without our being conscious of it. We are only aware of as much as is needed for this need-based communication.
Nietzsche argues that self-consciousness and language develop hand in hand. This has an interesting result. According to Nietzsche self-consciousness and language only develop as part of our social nature. Therefore, what is individual about us can never be understood self-consciously or expressed in language. Only our acts are individual. Consciousness levels everything it touches. The growth of consciousness is the growth of superficiality and generalization. Additionally, because self-consciousness and thus knowledge only arises out of our social needs, human beings only 'know' that which is useful in the interests of the 'human herd.'
After touching on the issue of knowledge, Nietzsche now turns to consider it more thoroughly . According to him, knowledge is the reduction of something strange to something familiar. The need for this reduction is human beings' instinct of fear and desire for security. In contrast, Nietzsche argues that what is most familiar is what we know the least because we are so blinded by our usual way of seeing it. In particular, he criticizes the mentalism of the philosophical tradition, which has claimed that self-consciousness is most familiar and thus most certain and knowable. In fact, it is most foreign to us.
Nietzsche now turns to discuss a general cultural phenomena of roles and what he calls role faith. He observes that in his age Europeans have become artistic, they have begun to confound themselves with the roles that they have played in their lives, with their vocations. In particular, the see themselves as akin to great artists who have cultivated their 'performance' in this role. They do this without realizing the other roles they could have played if things have turned out slightly differently. Nietzsche maintains that there is a spectrum of views that an individual can have about their relationship to their social roles. In the past, in the middle ages, individuals did not see their roles as roles as such. Rather, they saw themselves as in those positions, or professions by nature. In American and more and more frequently in Europe, he sees a growth of what he calls 'role faith.' This is the idea that an individual could play any role at all. The trouble with this is that the more an individual sees himself as playing a role, the more he becomes an actor. This leads to a growth in self-importance and lack of commitment; more specifically, the decline of the ability to sacrifice oneself in a great task that exceeds oneself. Indeed, Western man can no longer build a society that he can be committed to.
Nietzsche now explores the question of what is distinctive of Germanness. He does this through looking at great German philosophers and discussing what, if anything, is German about their thought. He finds something German in Leibniz , Kant, and Hegel. He then turns to the question of Schopenhauer with his pessimism about the value of existence. He does not find his insights particularly German. Instead, he think his atheistic pessimism is the universal fruit of European consciousness. The European 'will for truth' or 'discipline of truth' must eventually forbid itself the lie in faith in God, who might ensure the value of existence.
Nietzsche finally fully articulates the ironical result that the 'will for truth' has destroyed Christian religion. The 'will for truth' is a development out of Christian morality and its focus on truthfulness. The seeking out of consciousness in confession has been translated and sublimated into scientific conscience. Scientific conscience has destroyed our ability to see God-given meaning in nature, history, or own lives. This self-overcoming severity is the fulfillment of European consciousness, it is what makes us 'good Europeans.' Consequently, Schopenhauer's question, whether there is an meaning at all to existence, arises. Nietzsche believes that German philosophers have in general shied away from this truly deep question.
Nietzsche views Christianity as on the verge of collapse. He believes that this destruction began with the reformation. This is because the northern spirit of the Reformation could not understand the nature of a church. The northerners are too simple, not distrustful enough, to appreciate a church. Luther was the product of the common people, without an instinct for power. By opening the Bible to everyone and removing authority from church bodies, he initiated the leveling forces that would destroy the Christianity. Nietzsche very interestingly links confession and priestly celibacy. Confession could only be given to an individual that was not part of the common order to nature. Luther's abolishment of the priesthood is the rejection by a commoner of the elitism of the southern homines religioisi. Nietzsche believes that this leveling has the result of making the European spirit shallower and more 'good-natured.' He links this also with the growth of scientific scholarship as well as the lack shame and depth that characterizes this scholarship. In sum, the reformation was a leveling peasant rebellion against 'spiritual' elitism. It brought about the destruction of the church, which Nietzsche claims is "a structure for ruling that secures the highest rank for the more spiritual human beings and that believes in the power of spirituality to the extent of forbidding itself the use of all the cruder instruments of force." (313) He claims that a church is a more noble institution, on this account, than a state.
Nietzsche claims that the most avid advocates of morality are motivated by the ulterior motives of asserting their own superiority and their will to revenge on others. These individuals have 'turned out badly,' they have desires that society deems bad, but do not have the courage to act on them. They are also born into luxury and are thus bored with no work to do. They use morality in order to feel superior and to revenge themselves upon those that have the courage to act out their desires. He characterizes Augustine as among these individuals.
Nietzsche distinguishes between two causes for action. There is first and more primarily the discharging of dammed-up energy that must be released in some way. Second, there is the directing cause, that which directs this discharge of energy into some defined path or purpose. Nietzsche believes that the philosophical tradition has thought of the second as primarily when in fact it is random and arbitrary. The purpose is most often created post-hoc in order to rationalize the more primary discharge of energy.
Nietzsche now returns to discuss the actor, who had been discussed above in reference to the artistic nature of European society. An actor possess 'falseness with good conscience.' The ability to act develops as a result of being in the lower classes and having to accommodate oneself to circumstances beyond one's control. One thus learns how to play the role that is required. Diplomats ,Jews, and women have this capacity in particular.
Having mentioned women, Nietzsche discusses the different views that men and women have about love. He does not think that they have equal claims in love. Woman mean total devotion to a man by love. Man wants this type of love from woman, but does not offer it in turn. Indeed, Nietzsche claims that it is impossible for man to offer this same type of total devotion. There cannot be a reciprocal renunciation of self, otherwise there is a mere 'empty space.' Woman wants to totally renounce herself and become a possession of someone. In order for this to happen, the man cannot renounce himself, he needs to be around in order to take possession of the woman. Faithfulness is thus an essential part of woman's love, it might follow from a man's love, but it is not essential.
Nietzsche now discusses some issues relating to getting along with other people. The upshot is the most people are distasteful, associating with them requires forbearance and patience. Nietzsche also suggests that we must become 'posthumous persons,' dead to others. Once we do this we will be enter into true life. I am not entirely clear what he means by this.
Nietzsche then gives us advice about Dissertations. He says that one can always get a sense that book is 'too scholarly.' That it was written in cramped quarters, without wider concerns. That is author is a specialist, who overestimates the importance of his specialty. On the other hand, the 'man of letters' who has no specialty is cursed with superficiality, the 'jack of all trades, master of none.'
Nietzsche moves to give more consideration to art. He claims that all art can be divided into monological art and art before witnesses. He claims that the belief that prayer, of faith, is only considered an act in solitude, monological by unbelievers. In its native environment it is always preformed before witnesses.
Nietzsche now discusses the music of Wagner. He does not like Wagner's music by this point. He wants music that will give his body its own ease. Wagner is an actor, in the sense described above. There is something about this, apparently, that forecloses the possibility of his music providing the ease that Nietzsche is looking for. In general, he thinks of the theater as a place were one becomes part of the leveling heard.
Nietzsche also claims that the most productive artists are blessed with a certain lack of self-consciousness . They simply produce their art. They do not make it by comparing it with others and evaluating it. Thus, it is possible for a great artist to thoroughly misinterpret their own work.
Nietzsche now turns to discuss Romanticism. He returns to his early claim that all philosophy and art stems from an attempt to get along in life. Often philosophy and art have their origins in particular sufferings, as attempts, or hopes, to do away with this suffering. He then claims that there are two types of suffering and thus two types of art and philosophy. There is suffering from the over-abundance of life, which gives rise to Dionysian art and a tragic view of life. And there is suffering from impoverishment of life, which gives rise to a quest for rest and clam or, alternatively, anesthesia and madness . Romanticism is of this later type, it includes Schopenhauer and Wagner. This distinction between over-fullness of life and impoverishment of life stands behind many other distinctions for Nietzsche. It should be noted that Nietzsche does not reject all pessimism. In fact, he claims that there is Dionysian pessimism which is central to him, but he does not elaborate on it.
Nietzsche now turns to discusses the relationship between idealism and the senses. He claims that in his age all philosophers are believers in the senses in practice. He claims that earlier philosophers' opposition to the senses was a fear to be tempted by the world. The old philosophers, by eschewing the senses, become heartless, like philosophical vampires. Today, philosophers are afraid of being seduced by ideas instead.
As he moves towards the end of the chapter, Nietzsche returns to the theme with which he opened - "Science as a prejudice." He claims that scholars, due to the social background from which they arise, are incapable of getting a glimpse of the real questions and visions. He then applies this to materialistic scientists. The vision that there method expresses, a universe that can be examined and entirely understood, is disgusting. It destroys the existence of ambiguity in the world as well anything that might evoke awe and reverence. Additionally, there is something narcissistic in viewing the world in a certain way because it lets one go about one's own work productively. Further, it is possible that what can be grasped first, the material aspect of the world, is not the deepest understanding of the world. Imagine claiming to grasp a piece of music by providing complete measurement of its acoustics. Moreover, this materialistic understanding of the world entirely divests the world of meaning.
Nietzsche now discusses one of the most important aspects of his thought - his perspectivalism. He claims that we cannot determine whether there is any existence without interpretation, whether it is interpretation all the way down. When engaged in this question the human intellect cannot get out of its own particular perspective. In a way, then, the world has become infinite again, there are an infinite possible interpretations of the world. The difference between this new infinite and the old infinite, is that the old infinite was divine, this new infinite, in contrast, is self-consciously human, some possibilities are full of human stupidity and folly.
On a related point, Nietzsche now discusses why modern men are opposed to about ultimate convictions. Partially, this is the result of the disappointment of not finding any certainty. But, it is also merely a result of the desire to swing to the opposite side from which one used to be. Having been fixated by certainty and ultimacy, modern man luxuriates in being 'free as such.'
Nietzsche claims that those who appreciate his Gay Science are homeless in modern European society. They disfavor any particular ideals that might provide them with a home. They see society coming apart of its own and therefore cannot dwell in it. Nietzsche and those like him do not want to return to a past age. But they do not feel at home in this age, which sees itself as the most humane age. They see its humanity as a mask for its weakness and sickness. They desire a time of action and adventure. As good Europeans in the sense discussed above, they are spurred on to become homeless and negate allegiance to creed or nation. This is not done in the name of unbelief, but is rather based on particular type of faith. Faith in truth. Nietzsche also makes it clear that he despises the cult of Germaness that typifies Germany of his day.
Very interestingly, Nietzsche discusses how his work will be interpreted. He acknowledges that people will interpret him badly, but also asserts that his thought will always become 'bright again.'
Nietzsche then returns to his much earlier discussion of the critique of morality. He claims that in order to understand one's own morality one must go outside of it, go beyond it. If this is possible, one can compare one's previous morality, say European morality, with other moralities, thus gaining a better understanding of them both. In order to be able to attain this position, one must work hard on oneself, eliminating not only he prejudices that one has received from one's time and culture, but also those reactive-oppositions that one has towards one's time and culture. A failure to eliminate these reactive-oppositions will lead to romanticism.
Nietzsche now returns to discuss how he will be received. He claims that it is not a weakness of his writing that he deals with major philosophical questions quickly and briefly. He claims that it is a mere superstition to believe that problems cannot be dealt in this way. Further, he sees it as a bulwark against corrupting innocents. He also laments his lack of knowledge. In a comment that we can all sympathize with, he bemoans the growth of information and how impossible it is to know all that is out there. But he also thinks it is a problem to know to much, to be to scholarly, in the sense described above.
Nietzsche claims that he and those like him require a new great health. This is not a health that one merely has, rather it is one that "one acquires continually , and must acquire because one gives it up again and again, and must give it up." (346) Nietzsche now finally articulates his Dionysian ideal. "The ideal of a spirit that plays naively - that is not deliberately but from overflowing power and abundance - with all that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine; for whom those supreme things that people naturally accept as their value standards, signify danger, decay, debasement, or at least recreation, blindness, and temporary self-oblivion; the ideal of a human, superhuman well-being and benevolence that will often appear inhuman - for example, when it confronts all earthly seriousness so far, all solemnity in gesture, word, tone, eye, morality, and task so far, as if it were their most incarnate and involuntary parody - and in spite of this, it is perhaps only with him that great seriousness really begins, that the real question is posed for the first time, that the destiny of the soul changes, the hand moves forward, the tragedy begins." (347)
Nietzsche then closes with a consideration of the difficulty of the dialectic of despair and gaiety, superficiality and depth that he has expressed.
In the preface Nietzsche explains the meaning of the "Gay Science." I will merely cite his explanation so as not to prejudice our understanding of this difficult work: "Gay Science": that signifies that saturnalia of a spirit who patiently resisted a terrible, long pressure - patiently, severely , coldly, without submitting, but also without hope - and who is now all at once attacked by hope, the hope for health, and the intoxication of convalescence...This whole book is nothing but a bit of merry-making after a long privation and powerlessness, the rejoicing of strength that is returning, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that are open again, of goals that are permitted again, believed again." (32)
It is evident though that Nietzsche see himself as articulating a perspective that is almost stoically realistic at the same time as it is joyous and characterized by the affirmation of life. Indeed, in the Preface, Nietzsche also offers a short criticism of philosophical and religious thinkers whose thought is characterized by the denial, or negation, of life along with the search for some transcendent "Apart, Beyond, Outside." Nietzsche, strikingly similar to William James, maintains that this search has more to do with psychological needs, in particular relief from a particular form of suffering, than with any 'objective' philosophical requirements. Nietzsche, thus, embodies philosophy, removing the distance between a philosophers 'thought' and his all too physical life. He writes "I have asked myself whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body." Importantly, Nietzsche points this out not reveal the biases of previous philosophers and get on with 'objective' philosophy. Rather, it seems that he thinks that philosophy will always be thus embodied, but that previous philosophers were suffering from a particular affliction and pursued a particular cure. A cure that Nietzsche thinks does not actually restore health. Seemingly speaking about himself, he writes that: "I am still waiting for a philosophical physician in the exceptional sense of the word - one who has to pursue that problem of the total health of a people, time, race of humanity." (35) The job of this philosophical physician is both to reveal the true embodied character of the thought of previous times and to articulate new health-restoring thoughts. Nietzsche believes that his own time of sickness, of gloominess and near-despair, allows him to articulate thoughts that are truly joyous, full of the affirmation of life, or gaiety. A crucial component of the recovery of this affirmation of life is the realization that the 'will to truth,' the desire for truth at all costs is a form of sickness. Instead, Nietzsche believes that a certain concern with sensuality and superficiality, out of profundity, is necessary. This view has interesting implications for his thoughts about historicism and religion.
Book V: We Fearless Ones
Nietzsche begins this chapter by explaining his declaration that "God is dead" as that "the Christian God has become unbelievable."
He believes that his undermines European's "ancient and profound trust" turning it into doubt. Furthermore, it serves to bring down European morality, which had been based upon it. Nietzsche maintains, however, that this is not a cause of gloominess or despair, rather for philosophers and 'free spirits" like himself it is cause of cheerfulness, amazement, and expectation.
Nietzsche, then, explore the complex relationship of science to personal convictions. On the one hand, convictions are only admissible in science if they give up being convictions and become hypotheses, subject to verification. On the other hand, science itself rests on an unsupported conviction or faith. This is that "nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything has only second-rate value." (281) Nietzsche then explores whether this 'will to truth' stems from prudence or some sort of self-applied moral maxim. He quickly concludes that it cannot have its roots in prudence, as it is clear that often the 'will to truth' is harmful for others and oneself. Instead he argues that the 'will to truth' is derivative from a moral obligation not to deceive anyone. It includes the injunction not to even deceive oneself. Following from this, Nietzsche argues that the 'will to truth' like many other European moral inclinations has its roots in world negating Christian religion. Science thus is a metaphysical faith, one that affirms that value of the 'Truth' over all worldly goods. Thus, another interesting interplay develops in which the 'will to truth' destroys its own foundations by exposing the Christian God as a lie.
Nietzsche then discusses his approach to morality. He believes that part of the problem of past inquiries into morality was the scholars did not engage personally enough with the question. Instead, they merely struggled to provide foundations for generally accepted European-Christian morality. (Alasdair MacIntyre makes this point well in After Virtue, a work that is actually heavily indebted to Nietzsche for its criticisms). Previous thinkers have not engaged in a general critique of moral evaluation as such, nor have they explored the "history of the origins of these feelings and valuations." (284) Instead, they have criticized particular moral judgments. Or, if they embraced relativism, the have done so on the basis of the world-wide conflict among moral judgments. They have certainly not discussed the basic value of morality itself. According to Kaufmann, this means " question[ing] whether the effects of morality on those who are moral are beneficial." (285n16)
The question of whether morality is beneficial for man comes in connection with the realization that "God is dead." It has been revealed that the world itself is not rational, merciful or just. Thus shattering man's 'reverences.' Man is not something apart from the world as religion or rationalistic philosophy had maintained. He is under no obligation to divinely revealed or rationally imposed morality. Man is simply part of the world.
Nietzsche then discusses faith and the need for faith. According to him, faith or belief correlates with weakness. True fearlessness is the ability to face the absence of faith while still affirming life. More specifically, faith stems from a weakness of the will. When the will can no longer command, it desires someone else to command it. It does not have the strength or courage to act on its own command, so it needs to subject itself to someone's command. In contrast, Nietzsche puts forward his own ideal:"One could conceive of such pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities of dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence." (290)
Nietzsche then engages in an interesting exploration of the social origins of scholars that impact that their origins have on them.
I actually found his discussion of 'Jewish' habits of scholarship interesting and highly apt. He is not the only one to point out the distinct place of Jewish intellectuals in European culture, as both insiders and outsiders, builders and underminers. In particular, his point about logic and 'compelling agreement by force of reasons' can be illustrated though the example of his contemporary, Hermann Cohen. It is hard to deny that one of things that attracted Cohen to Kant was his rationalism and thus democratic aspect. It was certainly what Cohen did with neo-Kantianism.
Nietzsche now turns to a discussion of what is really fundamental instinct of life. He contests the then widely accepted scholarly claim that it is the preservation of life. He agues that the desire to preserve oneself is only a symptom of distress. The really fundamental instinct of life is the expansion of power. This desire to expand power takes risks with life, thus working against the instinct for self-preservation. "The great and small struggle always revolves around superiority, around growth and expansion, around power - in accordance with the will to power which is the will of life." (292)
Returning to religion, Nietzsche divides the religious personality into two types, which are similar to, though different from, James's once-born and twice-born souls. On the one hand, there are familiar, ingenuous, and superficial individuals. On the other hand, there a re graver, deeper, more meditative, 'evil,' and suspicious individuals. Nietzsche identifies the former with northern Europe and Protestantism and the later with southern Europe and Catholicism. He also sees the former as more democratic, in the negative leveling sense of the term. The later, suspicious of the nature of man, is more elitist. Protestantism is thus a 'peoples rebellion' against the elitism of the Catholicism.
Nietzsche then compares the ideal human type revered by the philosophers and the common people. The philosopher's ideal type is one "who lives and must live continually in the thundercloud of the highest problems and the heaviest responsibilities (by no means as an observer, outside, indifferent, secure, and objective). (293). The ideal type of the common people is the sage. He is quiet, serious, and simpleminded. The sage is a figure to which one can confess one's sins to and thus get rid of them. The sage has faith, wisdom, and thus certain knowledge. The philosopher despises the sage. Philosophers do not believe in men of certain knowledge. To be a philosopher is to love and thus seek after sophia, not to certainly possess it.
Nietzsche now moves to discuss morality more directly. According to him, moral discourse is means of covering the nakedness of European man. The European has become sickly. He is a herd animal of profound mediocrity, timidity and boredom. If he were health, a beast of prey, he would not need morality. Morality is way of covering of his weakness. It makes himlook more noble, important, respectable, and divine.
Nietzsche now shifts back to discuss the origin of religions. He claims that the founders of religion engage in a two stage process: 1) They posit a particular form of life that disciplines the will and abolishes boredom. 2)They bestow on this life style an interpretation that makes it valuable and worth fighting for. Nietzsche then argues that in fact the second stage is more important. Most of the time, founders of religion do not create a form of life ex nihlo. Rather, they take an existing form of life and reify it through the second stage. Thus, the distinctive skill of a founder of a religion is to be able to see a group of average people enmeshed in a type of life style and being able to get them to recognize themselves as a distinctive group - sharing something important - a religion.
Nietzsche then discusses self-consciousness and communication. Foreshadowing much of the thought of Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Brandom, Nietzsche argues that self-consciousness is not primary. Most of life would be possible without it. Rather, he argues that self-consciousness arises out of a need to communicate, the need to communicate distress to others. In order to communicate their distress, a human being needed to know what distresses him, how he feels, and what he thinks. Anticipating Freud as well, Nietzsche argues that much thought goes on in our thoughts without our being conscious of it. We are only aware of as much as is needed for this need-based communication.
Nietzsche argues that self-consciousness and language develop hand in hand. This has an interesting result. According to Nietzsche self-consciousness and language only develop as part of our social nature. Therefore, what is individual about us can never be understood self-consciously or expressed in language. Only our acts are individual. Consciousness levels everything it touches. The growth of consciousness is the growth of superficiality and generalization. Additionally, because self-consciousness and thus knowledge only arises out of our social needs, human beings only 'know' that which is useful in the interests of the 'human herd.'
After touching on the issue of knowledge, Nietzsche now turns to consider it more thoroughly . According to him, knowledge is the reduction of something strange to something familiar. The need for this reduction is human beings' instinct of fear and desire for security. In contrast, Nietzsche argues that what is most familiar is what we know the least because we are so blinded by our usual way of seeing it. In particular, he criticizes the mentalism of the philosophical tradition, which has claimed that self-consciousness is most familiar and thus most certain and knowable. In fact, it is most foreign to us.
Nietzsche now turns to discuss a general cultural phenomena of roles and what he calls role faith. He observes that in his age Europeans have become artistic, they have begun to confound themselves with the roles that they have played in their lives, with their vocations. In particular, the see themselves as akin to great artists who have cultivated their 'performance' in this role. They do this without realizing the other roles they could have played if things have turned out slightly differently. Nietzsche maintains that there is a spectrum of views that an individual can have about their relationship to their social roles. In the past, in the middle ages, individuals did not see their roles as roles as such. Rather, they saw themselves as in those positions, or professions by nature. In American and more and more frequently in Europe, he sees a growth of what he calls 'role faith.' This is the idea that an individual could play any role at all. The trouble with this is that the more an individual sees himself as playing a role, the more he becomes an actor. This leads to a growth in self-importance and lack of commitment; more specifically, the decline of the ability to sacrifice oneself in a great task that exceeds oneself. Indeed, Western man can no longer build a society that he can be committed to.
Nietzsche now explores the question of what is distinctive of Germanness. He does this through looking at great German philosophers and discussing what, if anything, is German about their thought. He finds something German in Leibniz , Kant, and Hegel. He then turns to the question of Schopenhauer with his pessimism about the value of existence. He does not find his insights particularly German. Instead, he think his atheistic pessimism is the universal fruit of European consciousness. The European 'will for truth' or 'discipline of truth' must eventually forbid itself the lie in faith in God, who might ensure the value of existence.
Nietzsche finally fully articulates the ironical result that the 'will for truth' has destroyed Christian religion. The 'will for truth' is a development out of Christian morality and its focus on truthfulness. The seeking out of consciousness in confession has been translated and sublimated into scientific conscience. Scientific conscience has destroyed our ability to see God-given meaning in nature, history, or own lives. This self-overcoming severity is the fulfillment of European consciousness, it is what makes us 'good Europeans.' Consequently, Schopenhauer's question, whether there is an meaning at all to existence, arises. Nietzsche believes that German philosophers have in general shied away from this truly deep question.
Nietzsche views Christianity as on the verge of collapse. He believes that this destruction began with the reformation. This is because the northern spirit of the Reformation could not understand the nature of a church. The northerners are too simple, not distrustful enough, to appreciate a church. Luther was the product of the common people, without an instinct for power. By opening the Bible to everyone and removing authority from church bodies, he initiated the leveling forces that would destroy the Christianity. Nietzsche very interestingly links confession and priestly celibacy. Confession could only be given to an individual that was not part of the common order to nature. Luther's abolishment of the priesthood is the rejection by a commoner of the elitism of the southern homines religioisi. Nietzsche believes that this leveling has the result of making the European spirit shallower and more 'good-natured.' He links this also with the growth of scientific scholarship as well as the lack shame and depth that characterizes this scholarship. In sum, the reformation was a leveling peasant rebellion against 'spiritual' elitism. It brought about the destruction of the church, which Nietzsche claims is "a structure for ruling that secures the highest rank for the more spiritual human beings and that believes in the power of spirituality to the extent of forbidding itself the use of all the cruder instruments of force." (313) He claims that a church is a more noble institution, on this account, than a state.
Nietzsche claims that the most avid advocates of morality are motivated by the ulterior motives of asserting their own superiority and their will to revenge on others. These individuals have 'turned out badly,' they have desires that society deems bad, but do not have the courage to act on them. They are also born into luxury and are thus bored with no work to do. They use morality in order to feel superior and to revenge themselves upon those that have the courage to act out their desires. He characterizes Augustine as among these individuals.
Nietzsche distinguishes between two causes for action. There is first and more primarily the discharging of dammed-up energy that must be released in some way. Second, there is the directing cause, that which directs this discharge of energy into some defined path or purpose. Nietzsche believes that the philosophical tradition has thought of the second as primarily when in fact it is random and arbitrary. The purpose is most often created post-hoc in order to rationalize the more primary discharge of energy.
Nietzsche now returns to discuss the actor, who had been discussed above in reference to the artistic nature of European society. An actor possess 'falseness with good conscience.' The ability to act develops as a result of being in the lower classes and having to accommodate oneself to circumstances beyond one's control. One thus learns how to play the role that is required. Diplomats ,Jews, and women have this capacity in particular.
Having mentioned women, Nietzsche discusses the different views that men and women have about love. He does not think that they have equal claims in love. Woman mean total devotion to a man by love. Man wants this type of love from woman, but does not offer it in turn. Indeed, Nietzsche claims that it is impossible for man to offer this same type of total devotion. There cannot be a reciprocal renunciation of self, otherwise there is a mere 'empty space.' Woman wants to totally renounce herself and become a possession of someone. In order for this to happen, the man cannot renounce himself, he needs to be around in order to take possession of the woman. Faithfulness is thus an essential part of woman's love, it might follow from a man's love, but it is not essential.
Nietzsche now discusses some issues relating to getting along with other people. The upshot is the most people are distasteful, associating with them requires forbearance and patience. Nietzsche also suggests that we must become 'posthumous persons,' dead to others. Once we do this we will be enter into true life. I am not entirely clear what he means by this.
Nietzsche then gives us advice about Dissertations. He says that one can always get a sense that book is 'too scholarly.' That it was written in cramped quarters, without wider concerns. That is author is a specialist, who overestimates the importance of his specialty. On the other hand, the 'man of letters' who has no specialty is cursed with superficiality, the 'jack of all trades, master of none.'
Nietzsche moves to give more consideration to art. He claims that all art can be divided into monological art and art before witnesses. He claims that the belief that prayer, of faith, is only considered an act in solitude, monological by unbelievers. In its native environment it is always preformed before witnesses.
Nietzsche now discusses the music of Wagner. He does not like Wagner's music by this point. He wants music that will give his body its own ease. Wagner is an actor, in the sense described above. There is something about this, apparently, that forecloses the possibility of his music providing the ease that Nietzsche is looking for. In general, he thinks of the theater as a place were one becomes part of the leveling heard.
Nietzsche also claims that the most productive artists are blessed with a certain lack of self-consciousness . They simply produce their art. They do not make it by comparing it with others and evaluating it. Thus, it is possible for a great artist to thoroughly misinterpret their own work.
Nietzsche now turns to discuss Romanticism. He returns to his early claim that all philosophy and art stems from an attempt to get along in life. Often philosophy and art have their origins in particular sufferings, as attempts, or hopes, to do away with this suffering. He then claims that there are two types of suffering and thus two types of art and philosophy. There is suffering from the over-abundance of life, which gives rise to Dionysian art and a tragic view of life. And there is suffering from impoverishment of life, which gives rise to a quest for rest and clam or, alternatively, anesthesia and madness . Romanticism is of this later type, it includes Schopenhauer and Wagner. This distinction between over-fullness of life and impoverishment of life stands behind many other distinctions for Nietzsche. It should be noted that Nietzsche does not reject all pessimism. In fact, he claims that there is Dionysian pessimism which is central to him, but he does not elaborate on it.
Nietzsche now turns to discusses the relationship between idealism and the senses. He claims that in his age all philosophers are believers in the senses in practice. He claims that earlier philosophers' opposition to the senses was a fear to be tempted by the world. The old philosophers, by eschewing the senses, become heartless, like philosophical vampires. Today, philosophers are afraid of being seduced by ideas instead.
As he moves towards the end of the chapter, Nietzsche returns to the theme with which he opened - "Science as a prejudice." He claims that scholars, due to the social background from which they arise, are incapable of getting a glimpse of the real questions and visions. He then applies this to materialistic scientists. The vision that there method expresses, a universe that can be examined and entirely understood, is disgusting. It destroys the existence of ambiguity in the world as well anything that might evoke awe and reverence. Additionally, there is something narcissistic in viewing the world in a certain way because it lets one go about one's own work productively. Further, it is possible that what can be grasped first, the material aspect of the world, is not the deepest understanding of the world. Imagine claiming to grasp a piece of music by providing complete measurement of its acoustics. Moreover, this materialistic understanding of the world entirely divests the world of meaning.
Nietzsche now discusses one of the most important aspects of his thought - his perspectivalism. He claims that we cannot determine whether there is any existence without interpretation, whether it is interpretation all the way down. When engaged in this question the human intellect cannot get out of its own particular perspective. In a way, then, the world has become infinite again, there are an infinite possible interpretations of the world. The difference between this new infinite and the old infinite, is that the old infinite was divine, this new infinite, in contrast, is self-consciously human, some possibilities are full of human stupidity and folly.
On a related point, Nietzsche now discusses why modern men are opposed to about ultimate convictions. Partially, this is the result of the disappointment of not finding any certainty. But, it is also merely a result of the desire to swing to the opposite side from which one used to be. Having been fixated by certainty and ultimacy, modern man luxuriates in being 'free as such.'
Nietzsche claims that those who appreciate his Gay Science are homeless in modern European society. They disfavor any particular ideals that might provide them with a home. They see society coming apart of its own and therefore cannot dwell in it. Nietzsche and those like him do not want to return to a past age. But they do not feel at home in this age, which sees itself as the most humane age. They see its humanity as a mask for its weakness and sickness. They desire a time of action and adventure. As good Europeans in the sense discussed above, they are spurred on to become homeless and negate allegiance to creed or nation. This is not done in the name of unbelief, but is rather based on particular type of faith. Faith in truth. Nietzsche also makes it clear that he despises the cult of Germaness that typifies Germany of his day.
Very interestingly, Nietzsche discusses how his work will be interpreted. He acknowledges that people will interpret him badly, but also asserts that his thought will always become 'bright again.'
Nietzsche then returns to his much earlier discussion of the critique of morality. He claims that in order to understand one's own morality one must go outside of it, go beyond it. If this is possible, one can compare one's previous morality, say European morality, with other moralities, thus gaining a better understanding of them both. In order to be able to attain this position, one must work hard on oneself, eliminating not only he prejudices that one has received from one's time and culture, but also those reactive-oppositions that one has towards one's time and culture. A failure to eliminate these reactive-oppositions will lead to romanticism.
Nietzsche now returns to discuss how he will be received. He claims that it is not a weakness of his writing that he deals with major philosophical questions quickly and briefly. He claims that it is a mere superstition to believe that problems cannot be dealt in this way. Further, he sees it as a bulwark against corrupting innocents. He also laments his lack of knowledge. In a comment that we can all sympathize with, he bemoans the growth of information and how impossible it is to know all that is out there. But he also thinks it is a problem to know to much, to be to scholarly, in the sense described above.
Nietzsche claims that he and those like him require a new great health. This is not a health that one merely has, rather it is one that "one acquires continually , and must acquire because one gives it up again and again, and must give it up." (346) Nietzsche now finally articulates his Dionysian ideal. "The ideal of a spirit that plays naively - that is not deliberately but from overflowing power and abundance - with all that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine; for whom those supreme things that people naturally accept as their value standards, signify danger, decay, debasement, or at least recreation, blindness, and temporary self-oblivion; the ideal of a human, superhuman well-being and benevolence that will often appear inhuman - for example, when it confronts all earthly seriousness so far, all solemnity in gesture, word, tone, eye, morality, and task so far, as if it were their most incarnate and involuntary parody - and in spite of this, it is perhaps only with him that great seriousness really begins, that the real question is posed for the first time, that the destiny of the soul changes, the hand moves forward, the tragedy begins." (347)
Nietzsche then closes with a consideration of the difficulty of the dialectic of despair and gaiety, superficiality and depth that he has expressed.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Altizer - The Gospel of Christian Atheism
Introduction
"It is the thesis of this book that the Christian, and the Christian alone, can speak of God in our time; but the message the Christian is now called to proclaim is the gospel, the good news or the glad tidings, of the death of God" (15). Altizer laments the fact that the language of the theologian today (Barthians) has become largely one of polemical attack and lauds the coming of a new kind of theologian in America, a modern and radical Christian who is seeking a totally incarnate Word. This kind of radical Christian (as opposed to the religious Christian) abandons the idea that theology is a continual elucidation of an eternal and unchanging Word, rejecting both the literal and historical interpretations of the Bible for a pneumatic/spiritual understanding of the Word. The radical Christian is inspired by the works of protest against Christianity, namely those of Nietzsche, Blake and Hegel, who deem Christianity a "No-saying," a flight from life, an evasion of suffering, a refusal of the burden and anguish of the human condition. All this is an attack on God as transcendent Other, and the radical Christian understands that the death of that God is necessary for true Christianity to emerge.
Chapter 1: The Uniqueness of Christianity
I. Religion: Altizer begins by comparing Christianity with "Oriental mysticism," which is essentially a way of radical world-negation that seeks in a backward movement to return to the primordial Totality at a paradisical Beginning. In its religious form, Christianity is not so different from this mysticism; but "a reborn and radical Christian faith must renounce every temptation to return to an original or primordial sacred" (40).
II. Word and History: The uniqueness of the Christian Word lies in the fact that it is a dynamic, a living, and a forward-moving process (in contrast to Oriental mysticism). The Word is real for Christians only to the extent that it becomes one with human flesh. "An understanding of a fully kenotic Christ continues to elude the theologian, who at best has reached Karl Barth's ironic and antikenotic conclusion that God's omnipotence is such that it can assume the form of weakness and in that form can triumph" (43). There is an inevitable incompatibility between the primordial Christian God and an incarnate or kenotic Christ; so long as the Christian God continues to be known as transcendent, he cannot appear in his uniquely Christian form as the Incarnate Word and kenotic Christ. When Blake said "God is Jesus," he meant that God abandoned his transcendent form. If, as in the Christian religious tradition, he does not become the Incarnate Word, he becomes the solitary God of Blake's Satan, Hegel's abstract spirit or Melville's Moby Dick.
III. Fall and Death: Religious Christianity resists the movement of the Word, opposing its abandonment of an original and primordial sacred by resurrecting the Word in a religious form. A fully consistent or radical Christianity knows the totality of the Fall and consequently condemns the religious quest for an unfallen sacred, repudiates the God who alone is God and renounces all attachment to the past. Christianity alone proclaims the death of the sacred, and thus only in Christianity do we find a concrete experience of the factuality and finality of death (i.e., ain't no afterlife). Radical Christians are thus open to death as an ultimately real event. But once again, the historical forms of Christianity have failed to embody the full and radical consequences of the Christian Word. It is faith's resistance to the Word becoming fully actualized in the flesh that has driven it to the backward movement of religion.
Chapter 2: Jesus and the Incarnation
I. The Name of Jesus: In the radical Christian vision, we understand that the Jesus of the Christian tradition was born only by means of the negation of the original Jesus. The image of the dead Jesus is perpetuated by Christian orthodoxy in the mask of the God-man, while the true Jesus has passed through his death from a particular to a universal form. What is unique about Jesus is the epiphany of the totality of the sacred in the contingency of a particular moment of time: in this name the sacred appears and is real only to the extent that it becomes actual and realized in history. The Jesus of the radical Christian is best represented in Nietzsche's Zarathustra, whose goal is to "will backwards," to transform the dreadful accident of all "it was" into "thus I will it" or "thus shall I will it," thereby making possible a Yes-saying to the oppressive contingency of time.
II. Kenosis: The "atheism" of a radical Christian is a prophetic reaction to a distant and nonredemptive God who by virtue of his very sovereignty and transcendence stands wholly apart from the forward movement and the historical presence of the Incarnate Word. Christian scholasticism made the mistake of identifying God with Aristotle's actus purus, thus removing him completely from the world. In Eckhart's and Bohme's mysticism, and then in Hegel's dialectics, however, one finds a different conception of God as Spirit, or the kenotic or emptying process of negativity. Hegel does not simply negate the root idea of the aseity of Being, he reverses this idea by conceiving Being as a perpetual process of becoming its own other. It is only in Hegel that we may discover an idea of God or Being or Spirit which embodies an understanding of the theological meaning of the Incarnation, which is that Spirit only comes to know itself and fulfill its destiny by completely emptying itself into its otherness. "God is Jesus" means the Incarnation is a total and all-consuming act: as Spirit becomes the Word that empties the Speaker of himself, the whole reality of Spirit becomes incarnate in its opposite. A Christian proclamation of the love of God is a proclamation that God has negated himself in becoming flesh, his Word is now the oppposite of the intrinsic otherness of his primordial Being, and God himself has ceased to exist in his original mode as transcendent or disincarnate Spirit.
III. The Universal Humanity: Blake named Jesus the "Universal Humanity," and the comprehensiveness of Blake's vision impelled him to seek the presence of Jesus in that world of experience most estranged from the Christ of Christian orthodoxy. The death of God in Jesus effected a transition from Innocence to Experience, but Jesus cannot appear as the "Universal Humanity" until the transcendent realm has been emptied and darkened.
Chapter 3: God and History
I. Dialectic and Theology: We can sense the estrangement of the contemporary Christian from his own theological heritage by simply noting the inability of all traditional forms of theology to speak in the presence of our history. Theology must open itself to the address of a Word that has become fully actual in the present and abandon a religious form, for to the extent that theology remains bound to a primordial Word it will remain closed to the present and human actuality of history. Augustine and Luther both attempted the dialectical thinking proper to radical Christianity: "Augustine's conception of the omnipresence and the omnipotence of grace proceeded out of a dialectical negation and reversal of the ontological givenness of Being, just as Luther's understanding of the free gift of grace in Christ rested on an abridgment or annulment of the transcendent distance and the sovereign authority of the Creator" (78-79). Yet both remained bound to past and heteronomous norms, closing themselves off to the real and dynamic movement of the Word. A Christian dialectical theology must direct itself to an understanding of a Word that is penetrating the present, or a transcendent Word becoming immanent. Only a false dialectic posits an ultimate and irreconcilable chasm between opposites. Certainly no Christian or incarnational theology can submit to a final and absolute opposition between time and Eternity or the finite and the infinite. Nothing less is demanded of contemporary theology than that it open itself to the meaning of an apocalyptic and total redemption.
II. The Christian Name of God: In a nutshell, "from the point of view of a radical and dialectical Christian theology, the absolutely decisive and fundamental theological prnciple is that the God of faith so far from being unchanging and unmoving is a perpetual and forward-moving process of self-negation, pure negativity, or kenotic metamorphosis" (84). We must repudiate all religious conceptions of the mystery of the Godhead, with their inevitable corollary that the sacred or ultimate reality is impassive and silent. The God who reveals himself in history is the God who empties himself of the plenitude of his primordial Being; thereby he actually and truly becomes manifest in history, and finally history becomes not simply the arena of revelation but the very incarnate Body of God. A consistent and radical Christianity will embody no knowledge of the primordial God but instead will incorporate and make real that "Kingdom of God" which is a consequence of the absolute self-negation of God.
Non-dialectical understandings of Christianity, both natural and revealed theology, invariably establish a chasm between God and his redemptive acts: natural theology in conceiving a primordial or eternal nature of God that is incapable of either forward movement or redemptive action, and revealed theology positing a sovereign Lord who is infinitely removed from the immediate or historical reality of his creation. Blake saw that the Gods of deism and orthodoxy were the same.
III. God and Satan: Nietzsche's attack on the infinitude of guilt and punishment is Blake's attack on Urizen and Hegel's attack on an alien and lifeless form of Spirit. Altizer agrees with Nietzsche that the Christian God is the deepest embodiment of No-saying, the absolute negation of life, but that in his absolute self-negation, that God becomes wholly Other. If God truly negates himself, then his alien and empty form is an inevitable consequence of his own act of self-negation, and thence God himself can only be present or real in his divine form as the absolute antithesis of life and energy. Thus, only a Christian can know a God that is wholly Other. The kenotic movement of the Incarnation reaches its consummation when God finally appears in human experience as the contradiction of life and the deification of nothingness. In his Angst, the radical Christian recognizes the "smell" of God's decomposition. For to know an alien and empty nothingness as the dead body of God is to be liberated from every uncanny and awesome sense of the mystery and power of chaos.
Satan is the power enclosing energy and stilling movement, the power of darkness standing over against and opposing all life and light. In the end, the Christian God is Satan. Satan's chaos is present wherever his "web of religion" binds life and energy to the laws of his own identity. Religion becomes repressive when it arises in response to the kenotic movement of the Incarnation, regressing to a now empty and alien form of Spirit by binding itself to that dead body of God which Blake names as Satan. When the radical Christian confronts us with the liberating message that God is Satan, he is stilling the power of that negation, breaking all those webs of religion with which a regressive Christianity has ensnared the Christian, and unveiling the God who had died in Christ.
Chapter 4: The Self-Annihilation of God
I. The Death of God: The proclamation of the death of God is a Christian confession of faith. For to know that God is dead is to know the God who died in Jesus Christ. Only the radical Christian knows that God has ceased to be active and real in his preincarnate or primordial reality. It is Christianity alone which witnesses to a concrete and actual descent of the sacred into the profane, a movement wherein the sacred progressively abandons or negates its particular and given expressions. And it is precisely the radical Christian's alienation from the religious world which can make possible our relation of the fundamental if underlying meaning of the earliest expressions of the Christian faith. Paul and the early church were not able to fully or decisively negate the religious forms of the old history. Consequently, early Christianity was unable either to negate religion or to absorb and fully assimilate an apocalyptic faith, with the result that it progressively became estranged from its own initial proclamation. The radical Christian happily proclaims the death of God, which does not propel man into an empty darkness, but liberates him from every alien and opposing other. But the kenotic movement does not happen at any given moment: the actualization of the metamorphosis of the Word into flesh is a continual and forward-moving process, a process initially occurring in God's death in Christ, yes, but a process that is only gradually and progressively realized in history, as God's original self-negation eventually becomes actualized throughout the total range of human experience. Let the contemporary Christian rejoice that Christianity has evolved the most alien, the most distant, and the most oppressive deity in history: it is precisely the self-alienation of God from his original redemptive form that has liberated humanity from the transcendent realm. The radical Christian recognizes the spiritual emptiness of our time as the historical actualization of the self-annihilation of God.
II. Atonement: When we understand the Incarnation and Crucifixion as dual expressions of the eschatological consummation of the self-negation of God, as an extension of the atoning process of the self-annihilation of God, it is clear that we need a new conception of atonement. The whole kenotic movement is an atoning process, a forward moving process wherein a vacuous and nameless power of evil becomes increasingly manifest as the dead body of God or Satan. Atonement is thus a negative process of reversing every alien other, a process of negating all negations.
We can understand our present alienation the moment before proper atonement, as Satan's becoming totally and comprehensively present in his apocalyptic form as the lifeless residue of the self-negation of God. In other words, we must pass through Hegel's unhappy consciousness in order to come to know the dissolution of the wholly Other. Consequently, the radical Christian repudiates the Christian dogma of the resurrection of Christ and his ascension into a celestial and transcendent realm because radical faith revolves around a participation in the Christ who is fully and totally present to us. Radical Christianity thus transposes the traditional vision of the resurrection into a contemporary vision of the descent into Hell: the crucified Christ descends ever more fully into darkness and flesh.
III. The Forgiveness of Sin: Protestant theologians have insisted that we can only know sin when we understand the forgiveness of sin, but in isolating sin from grace, they foreclose the possibility of understanding the forgiveness or annulment of sin. The radical Christian believes that the demands of the God of law and judgment are annulled in the grace of the God who died on Calvary. Faith takes as its task the negation of law and guilt and the abolition of the consciousness of sin. Guilt is a product of self-alienation, and forgiveness of sin is the process of self-annihilation of that guilt. It is only when man has been delivered from the threat of condemnation, a threat always present wherever humanity exists in a state of isolated selfhood, that a truly forgiven humanity can be liberated from Satan's power. Man must be delivered from good and evil, from self-hood, from his solitary and autonomous ego. When he ceases to be aware of the distance separating himself from others, his sin is forgiven. In Blake, this is when Satan and Jerusalem engage in a mutual embrace and actualize a new Totality of Love. The forgiveness of sin is an atoning process embodying the progressive realization in experience of the self-annihilation of God.
Chapter 5: A Wager
I. The Living Christ: The original heresy was the identification of the Church with the body of Christ; this kind of "forward movement" is simply an all-too-human regression to the will to power. The radical Christian, on the other hand, seeks the living Christ in the actuality and fullness of history. This does not mean, however, that we should simply submit to the brute reality of the world. We must rather understand the forward movement of Christianity to be a truly negative or self-emptying process, a process simultaneously negating both the Word and world which it embodies, and therefore a process transcending and moving beyond the initial expressions of its own movement.
Just as the Crucifixion makes real a divine movement into immanence, so too does the death of God progressively annul every human possibility of returning to transcendence. Only by willing this death of God can we be liberated from a transcendent beyond. This willing involves a genuine risk, but so too does religious Christianity, in alienating itself from the contemporary world. The radical Christian chooses a darkness issuing from the death of every image and symbol of transcendence and must bet that the darkness of his destiny is the present form and actuality of a totally incarnate body of Christ.
II. Guilt and Resentment: For Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, existence = guilt. For everything we know as consciousness and experience is grounded in repression, and to broaden or deepen our consciousness is to recognize the power of repression, a power creating all those dualistic oppositions or antinomies which split human existence asunder, dividing and isolating that shrunken energy of life. This power is that of law, judgment and sin, but the New Testament promises its forgiveness. When Jesus said, "Judge not," he was calling for an end of all moral judgment. Betting that the Christian God is dead, which is betting on the real and actual presence of the fully incarnate Christ, means that the ultimate ground of guilt and resentment is broken. We should nonetheless realize that this is all a bit nuts: "No honest contemporary seeker can ever lose sight of the very real possibility that the willing of the death of God is the way to madness, dehumanization, and even to the most totalitarian form of society yet realized in history" (146) (clearly Altizer rejects Paul's messaging tactics).
III. Yes-Saying: In alienation from the absent God of Christianity, people are increasingly turning towards Oriental mysticism without looking to the western tradition first. In Nietzsche's vision of the Eternal Recurrence, he proclaims a Yes-saying which embodies a total affirmation of meaninglessness and horror. This affirmation is only possible when man gives all the energy that he once directed to the transcendent beyond to the immediate moment. If we can find a way to affirm absolute immanence, then we can give ourselves to the darkest and most chaotic moments of our world as contemporary ways to the Christ who even now is becoming all in all. It is precisely by a radical movement of turning away from all previous forms of light that we can participate in a new totality of bliss. The sacred center of Oriental mysticism is a return to an interior depth or transcendent beyond which negates the profane, whereas Zarathustra's "center" lies at the very heart of profane existence. We must renounce every backward movement to eternity for the affirmation of a new eternity which is here and now.
"It is the thesis of this book that the Christian, and the Christian alone, can speak of God in our time; but the message the Christian is now called to proclaim is the gospel, the good news or the glad tidings, of the death of God" (15). Altizer laments the fact that the language of the theologian today (Barthians) has become largely one of polemical attack and lauds the coming of a new kind of theologian in America, a modern and radical Christian who is seeking a totally incarnate Word. This kind of radical Christian (as opposed to the religious Christian) abandons the idea that theology is a continual elucidation of an eternal and unchanging Word, rejecting both the literal and historical interpretations of the Bible for a pneumatic/spiritual understanding of the Word. The radical Christian is inspired by the works of protest against Christianity, namely those of Nietzsche, Blake and Hegel, who deem Christianity a "No-saying," a flight from life, an evasion of suffering, a refusal of the burden and anguish of the human condition. All this is an attack on God as transcendent Other, and the radical Christian understands that the death of that God is necessary for true Christianity to emerge.
Chapter 1: The Uniqueness of Christianity
I. Religion: Altizer begins by comparing Christianity with "Oriental mysticism," which is essentially a way of radical world-negation that seeks in a backward movement to return to the primordial Totality at a paradisical Beginning. In its religious form, Christianity is not so different from this mysticism; but "a reborn and radical Christian faith must renounce every temptation to return to an original or primordial sacred" (40).
II. Word and History: The uniqueness of the Christian Word lies in the fact that it is a dynamic, a living, and a forward-moving process (in contrast to Oriental mysticism). The Word is real for Christians only to the extent that it becomes one with human flesh. "An understanding of a fully kenotic Christ continues to elude the theologian, who at best has reached Karl Barth's ironic and antikenotic conclusion that God's omnipotence is such that it can assume the form of weakness and in that form can triumph" (43). There is an inevitable incompatibility between the primordial Christian God and an incarnate or kenotic Christ; so long as the Christian God continues to be known as transcendent, he cannot appear in his uniquely Christian form as the Incarnate Word and kenotic Christ. When Blake said "God is Jesus," he meant that God abandoned his transcendent form. If, as in the Christian religious tradition, he does not become the Incarnate Word, he becomes the solitary God of Blake's Satan, Hegel's abstract spirit or Melville's Moby Dick.
III. Fall and Death: Religious Christianity resists the movement of the Word, opposing its abandonment of an original and primordial sacred by resurrecting the Word in a religious form. A fully consistent or radical Christianity knows the totality of the Fall and consequently condemns the religious quest for an unfallen sacred, repudiates the God who alone is God and renounces all attachment to the past. Christianity alone proclaims the death of the sacred, and thus only in Christianity do we find a concrete experience of the factuality and finality of death (i.e., ain't no afterlife). Radical Christians are thus open to death as an ultimately real event. But once again, the historical forms of Christianity have failed to embody the full and radical consequences of the Christian Word. It is faith's resistance to the Word becoming fully actualized in the flesh that has driven it to the backward movement of religion.
Chapter 2: Jesus and the Incarnation
I. The Name of Jesus: In the radical Christian vision, we understand that the Jesus of the Christian tradition was born only by means of the negation of the original Jesus. The image of the dead Jesus is perpetuated by Christian orthodoxy in the mask of the God-man, while the true Jesus has passed through his death from a particular to a universal form. What is unique about Jesus is the epiphany of the totality of the sacred in the contingency of a particular moment of time: in this name the sacred appears and is real only to the extent that it becomes actual and realized in history. The Jesus of the radical Christian is best represented in Nietzsche's Zarathustra, whose goal is to "will backwards," to transform the dreadful accident of all "it was" into "thus I will it" or "thus shall I will it," thereby making possible a Yes-saying to the oppressive contingency of time.
II. Kenosis: The "atheism" of a radical Christian is a prophetic reaction to a distant and nonredemptive God who by virtue of his very sovereignty and transcendence stands wholly apart from the forward movement and the historical presence of the Incarnate Word. Christian scholasticism made the mistake of identifying God with Aristotle's actus purus, thus removing him completely from the world. In Eckhart's and Bohme's mysticism, and then in Hegel's dialectics, however, one finds a different conception of God as Spirit, or the kenotic or emptying process of negativity. Hegel does not simply negate the root idea of the aseity of Being, he reverses this idea by conceiving Being as a perpetual process of becoming its own other. It is only in Hegel that we may discover an idea of God or Being or Spirit which embodies an understanding of the theological meaning of the Incarnation, which is that Spirit only comes to know itself and fulfill its destiny by completely emptying itself into its otherness. "God is Jesus" means the Incarnation is a total and all-consuming act: as Spirit becomes the Word that empties the Speaker of himself, the whole reality of Spirit becomes incarnate in its opposite. A Christian proclamation of the love of God is a proclamation that God has negated himself in becoming flesh, his Word is now the oppposite of the intrinsic otherness of his primordial Being, and God himself has ceased to exist in his original mode as transcendent or disincarnate Spirit.
III. The Universal Humanity: Blake named Jesus the "Universal Humanity," and the comprehensiveness of Blake's vision impelled him to seek the presence of Jesus in that world of experience most estranged from the Christ of Christian orthodoxy. The death of God in Jesus effected a transition from Innocence to Experience, but Jesus cannot appear as the "Universal Humanity" until the transcendent realm has been emptied and darkened.
Chapter 3: God and History
I. Dialectic and Theology: We can sense the estrangement of the contemporary Christian from his own theological heritage by simply noting the inability of all traditional forms of theology to speak in the presence of our history. Theology must open itself to the address of a Word that has become fully actual in the present and abandon a religious form, for to the extent that theology remains bound to a primordial Word it will remain closed to the present and human actuality of history. Augustine and Luther both attempted the dialectical thinking proper to radical Christianity: "Augustine's conception of the omnipresence and the omnipotence of grace proceeded out of a dialectical negation and reversal of the ontological givenness of Being, just as Luther's understanding of the free gift of grace in Christ rested on an abridgment or annulment of the transcendent distance and the sovereign authority of the Creator" (78-79). Yet both remained bound to past and heteronomous norms, closing themselves off to the real and dynamic movement of the Word. A Christian dialectical theology must direct itself to an understanding of a Word that is penetrating the present, or a transcendent Word becoming immanent. Only a false dialectic posits an ultimate and irreconcilable chasm between opposites. Certainly no Christian or incarnational theology can submit to a final and absolute opposition between time and Eternity or the finite and the infinite. Nothing less is demanded of contemporary theology than that it open itself to the meaning of an apocalyptic and total redemption.
II. The Christian Name of God: In a nutshell, "from the point of view of a radical and dialectical Christian theology, the absolutely decisive and fundamental theological prnciple is that the God of faith so far from being unchanging and unmoving is a perpetual and forward-moving process of self-negation, pure negativity, or kenotic metamorphosis" (84). We must repudiate all religious conceptions of the mystery of the Godhead, with their inevitable corollary that the sacred or ultimate reality is impassive and silent. The God who reveals himself in history is the God who empties himself of the plenitude of his primordial Being; thereby he actually and truly becomes manifest in history, and finally history becomes not simply the arena of revelation but the very incarnate Body of God. A consistent and radical Christianity will embody no knowledge of the primordial God but instead will incorporate and make real that "Kingdom of God" which is a consequence of the absolute self-negation of God.
Non-dialectical understandings of Christianity, both natural and revealed theology, invariably establish a chasm between God and his redemptive acts: natural theology in conceiving a primordial or eternal nature of God that is incapable of either forward movement or redemptive action, and revealed theology positing a sovereign Lord who is infinitely removed from the immediate or historical reality of his creation. Blake saw that the Gods of deism and orthodoxy were the same.
III. God and Satan: Nietzsche's attack on the infinitude of guilt and punishment is Blake's attack on Urizen and Hegel's attack on an alien and lifeless form of Spirit. Altizer agrees with Nietzsche that the Christian God is the deepest embodiment of No-saying, the absolute negation of life, but that in his absolute self-negation, that God becomes wholly Other. If God truly negates himself, then his alien and empty form is an inevitable consequence of his own act of self-negation, and thence God himself can only be present or real in his divine form as the absolute antithesis of life and energy. Thus, only a Christian can know a God that is wholly Other. The kenotic movement of the Incarnation reaches its consummation when God finally appears in human experience as the contradiction of life and the deification of nothingness. In his Angst, the radical Christian recognizes the "smell" of God's decomposition. For to know an alien and empty nothingness as the dead body of God is to be liberated from every uncanny and awesome sense of the mystery and power of chaos.
Satan is the power enclosing energy and stilling movement, the power of darkness standing over against and opposing all life and light. In the end, the Christian God is Satan. Satan's chaos is present wherever his "web of religion" binds life and energy to the laws of his own identity. Religion becomes repressive when it arises in response to the kenotic movement of the Incarnation, regressing to a now empty and alien form of Spirit by binding itself to that dead body of God which Blake names as Satan. When the radical Christian confronts us with the liberating message that God is Satan, he is stilling the power of that negation, breaking all those webs of religion with which a regressive Christianity has ensnared the Christian, and unveiling the God who had died in Christ.
Chapter 4: The Self-Annihilation of God
I. The Death of God: The proclamation of the death of God is a Christian confession of faith. For to know that God is dead is to know the God who died in Jesus Christ. Only the radical Christian knows that God has ceased to be active and real in his preincarnate or primordial reality. It is Christianity alone which witnesses to a concrete and actual descent of the sacred into the profane, a movement wherein the sacred progressively abandons or negates its particular and given expressions. And it is precisely the radical Christian's alienation from the religious world which can make possible our relation of the fundamental if underlying meaning of the earliest expressions of the Christian faith. Paul and the early church were not able to fully or decisively negate the religious forms of the old history. Consequently, early Christianity was unable either to negate religion or to absorb and fully assimilate an apocalyptic faith, with the result that it progressively became estranged from its own initial proclamation. The radical Christian happily proclaims the death of God, which does not propel man into an empty darkness, but liberates him from every alien and opposing other. But the kenotic movement does not happen at any given moment: the actualization of the metamorphosis of the Word into flesh is a continual and forward-moving process, a process initially occurring in God's death in Christ, yes, but a process that is only gradually and progressively realized in history, as God's original self-negation eventually becomes actualized throughout the total range of human experience. Let the contemporary Christian rejoice that Christianity has evolved the most alien, the most distant, and the most oppressive deity in history: it is precisely the self-alienation of God from his original redemptive form that has liberated humanity from the transcendent realm. The radical Christian recognizes the spiritual emptiness of our time as the historical actualization of the self-annihilation of God.
II. Atonement: When we understand the Incarnation and Crucifixion as dual expressions of the eschatological consummation of the self-negation of God, as an extension of the atoning process of the self-annihilation of God, it is clear that we need a new conception of atonement. The whole kenotic movement is an atoning process, a forward moving process wherein a vacuous and nameless power of evil becomes increasingly manifest as the dead body of God or Satan. Atonement is thus a negative process of reversing every alien other, a process of negating all negations.
We can understand our present alienation the moment before proper atonement, as Satan's becoming totally and comprehensively present in his apocalyptic form as the lifeless residue of the self-negation of God. In other words, we must pass through Hegel's unhappy consciousness in order to come to know the dissolution of the wholly Other. Consequently, the radical Christian repudiates the Christian dogma of the resurrection of Christ and his ascension into a celestial and transcendent realm because radical faith revolves around a participation in the Christ who is fully and totally present to us. Radical Christianity thus transposes the traditional vision of the resurrection into a contemporary vision of the descent into Hell: the crucified Christ descends ever more fully into darkness and flesh.
III. The Forgiveness of Sin: Protestant theologians have insisted that we can only know sin when we understand the forgiveness of sin, but in isolating sin from grace, they foreclose the possibility of understanding the forgiveness or annulment of sin. The radical Christian believes that the demands of the God of law and judgment are annulled in the grace of the God who died on Calvary. Faith takes as its task the negation of law and guilt and the abolition of the consciousness of sin. Guilt is a product of self-alienation, and forgiveness of sin is the process of self-annihilation of that guilt. It is only when man has been delivered from the threat of condemnation, a threat always present wherever humanity exists in a state of isolated selfhood, that a truly forgiven humanity can be liberated from Satan's power. Man must be delivered from good and evil, from self-hood, from his solitary and autonomous ego. When he ceases to be aware of the distance separating himself from others, his sin is forgiven. In Blake, this is when Satan and Jerusalem engage in a mutual embrace and actualize a new Totality of Love. The forgiveness of sin is an atoning process embodying the progressive realization in experience of the self-annihilation of God.
Chapter 5: A Wager
I. The Living Christ: The original heresy was the identification of the Church with the body of Christ; this kind of "forward movement" is simply an all-too-human regression to the will to power. The radical Christian, on the other hand, seeks the living Christ in the actuality and fullness of history. This does not mean, however, that we should simply submit to the brute reality of the world. We must rather understand the forward movement of Christianity to be a truly negative or self-emptying process, a process simultaneously negating both the Word and world which it embodies, and therefore a process transcending and moving beyond the initial expressions of its own movement.
Just as the Crucifixion makes real a divine movement into immanence, so too does the death of God progressively annul every human possibility of returning to transcendence. Only by willing this death of God can we be liberated from a transcendent beyond. This willing involves a genuine risk, but so too does religious Christianity, in alienating itself from the contemporary world. The radical Christian chooses a darkness issuing from the death of every image and symbol of transcendence and must bet that the darkness of his destiny is the present form and actuality of a totally incarnate body of Christ.
II. Guilt and Resentment: For Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, existence = guilt. For everything we know as consciousness and experience is grounded in repression, and to broaden or deepen our consciousness is to recognize the power of repression, a power creating all those dualistic oppositions or antinomies which split human existence asunder, dividing and isolating that shrunken energy of life. This power is that of law, judgment and sin, but the New Testament promises its forgiveness. When Jesus said, "Judge not," he was calling for an end of all moral judgment. Betting that the Christian God is dead, which is betting on the real and actual presence of the fully incarnate Christ, means that the ultimate ground of guilt and resentment is broken. We should nonetheless realize that this is all a bit nuts: "No honest contemporary seeker can ever lose sight of the very real possibility that the willing of the death of God is the way to madness, dehumanization, and even to the most totalitarian form of society yet realized in history" (146) (clearly Altizer rejects Paul's messaging tactics).
III. Yes-Saying: In alienation from the absent God of Christianity, people are increasingly turning towards Oriental mysticism without looking to the western tradition first. In Nietzsche's vision of the Eternal Recurrence, he proclaims a Yes-saying which embodies a total affirmation of meaninglessness and horror. This affirmation is only possible when man gives all the energy that he once directed to the transcendent beyond to the immediate moment. If we can find a way to affirm absolute immanence, then we can give ourselves to the darkest and most chaotic moments of our world as contemporary ways to the Christ who even now is becoming all in all. It is precisely by a radical movement of turning away from all previous forms of light that we can participate in a new totality of bliss. The sacred center of Oriental mysticism is a return to an interior depth or transcendent beyond which negates the profane, whereas Zarathustra's "center" lies at the very heart of profane existence. We must renounce every backward movement to eternity for the affirmation of a new eternity which is here and now.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
The Epistle to the Romans
Karl Barth
Barth = Calvin + Kierkegaard
Preface
The book begins with the rediscovery of Paul and a polemic against the historical-critical method of Biblical criticism. The purpose of all historical investigations is to demonstrate the triviality of differences between the present and the past. The doctrine of inspiration is superior, Barth claims, to historical criticism, even granted that the latter has some uses. Thus, the goal of this book is to see “beyond history and into the spirit of the Bible,” with the assumption that what was important in the past remains relevant today.
First Chapter: Introduction
God is absolutely other. The purpose of the Gospel is to proclaim the radical incommensurability between God and man, and to stress the degree to which salvation is unearned and undeserved.
The Gospel is what gives time meaning; it is the “the seed of eternity” and the “fruit of time.” Here Barth adopts the fairly medieval practice of claiming that the New Testament unlocks the Old. He also adopts something like Kierkegaard’s understanding of the paradox and the role of the contemporary witness. Jesus/the resurrection were historical events in one sense, but in a deeper sense, divinity is radically incommensurable with the human.
Jesus gave Paul grace and apostleship. “Grace us the gift of Christ, who exposes the gulf which separates God and man, and, by exposing it, bridges it” (31). Grace means bearing witness to the fidelity of God to man, which is revealed in Christ. It brings with it a demand for obedience.
Personal Matters:
The existence of Christians, even in Rome, proves the power of the resurrection. The existence of this faith sets the “krisis” in motion. In one sense, believers feel a sense of community with each other. And yet, the realized existence of that community is not central to the existence of the Church. Paul never visits Rome, because God needs him to proselytize to the uninitiated.
The Theme of the Epistle
The Gospel is not in competition with other creeds. Rather, it exists above all other philosophies and religions, commenting on their limitations. “It sets a question mark against all truths” (35). IT - and the resurrection - reveal the power of God, which is not set above all other powers, as if it were the sum of all finite powers, but, rather, is wholly other.
The current world is marked by total sinfulness. Our bond with God is shattered and we are totally powerless to revive it. The Gospel does nothing to free us from this world; rather, it points to something we can’t comprehend. The Resurrection is both the forgiveness of sins, and the condemnation of the world. God says “no” to the world, and this is both tormenting and hopeful, because it comes from God. Because Christ both makes clear the gap between man and God, and overcomes it, faith means assenting to both the fallenness of the world, the “no” of God, and the hope of the resurrection.
Everyone is interpellated by the Gospel. The Jew is the first called to hear it, but it is an advantage without precedence. Everyone is equal before the Gospel. The Gospel reveals God’s righteousness. God’s righteousness consists in his harsh judgment on the world. The God which merely affirms creation, without condemning its sinfulness, is “No-God.” the true God must establish the absolute difference between himself and man. He affirms himself by condemning us, and the redeems us via Christ. God is faithful to us; he never forgets us.
The night
We are subject to the wrath of God, insofar as we do not love the judge and accept his negative judgment on creation. Men alienate themselves from the truth by seeking to obscure the distance between man and God. Basically, man deliberately obscures the difference between the two, then becomes trapped in that blindness, in various ways, such as divinizing nature.
Second Chapter: The Righteousness of Men
All humanity - whether righteous by its own standards or not - is subject to the wrath of God. Even men of God know this; they know faith is not an achievement, not part of a system, but, rather, the ground of all perception.
Grace is sight; it is the totally unjustified glimpse of reality, granted to specific individuals by God for literally no reason we can understand. To be this righteous man, to be saved, means to be negated and reformed and redeemed. There is no righteousness or hiding before God.
the Judgment
The law is a sign of God’s presence or a relic. Those who possess the law live their lives around the incomprehensible remainder of revelation. and yet, those with the law may become too reoccupied with it to look beyond it to the God it indicates. The Gentile may also fulfill the law without knowing it. Moreover, the Gentile may have the advantage of seeing more starkly the disintegration and sinfulness of the current world. We can never know who is marked by grace, and who is not; God often levels judgments that seem to contradict the state of facts.
Chapter 3: The righteousness of God
The judgment of God ends history; it doesn’t bring together a new era. The entirety of the world and history bears witness to God, is oriented by reference to the unknown.
God responds to our faithlessness with faithfulness, our evil with good. It would be a mistake, though, to believe then that our actions in the world are indifferent, or that we could cal forth greater goodness from God through evil.
Man’s righteousness is not God’s. Even possessing the law is not a guarantee of righteousness. Rather, the law points toward the abyss between man and God, it makes men aware of their sinfulness, and produces a horror of history.
Jesus
Grace in this world exists as a promise, which is to say it exists as an indictment of the present, strictly a negative. Jesus
The Voice of History
Reiteration of idea that God is wholly other. Turn to Abraham. Christ encapsulates the meaning of Abraham. History declares Abraham famous for his deeds, but faith means that he is famous for what, in his action, points beyond the temporal, to what is other. While his human righteousness might provide a ground for boasting, faith cannot. At most, God works through Abraham. Man must be broken down utterly before God.
Faith is reckoned to Abraham a righteousness, but such faith is distinct from his circumcision. Circumcision is a sign, pointing beyond; faith is something other. The church likewise possesses the same sort of righteousness as circumcision. They demand promise the the faith that is reckoned as righteousness before god, but they are not faith.
The entirety of Barth’s discussion of Israel can be summed up in this line: “Th Law, the History, and the Religion of Israel are the context in which men can await the heavenly inheritance; but they are not the effective power through which they enter it” (138).
Faith is essentially ahistorical. It provides a point puncturing time, making the past and the present contemporaneous. And yet, particular episodes in history can possess universal importance, precisely by dissolving the difference between past and present.
Faith requires annihilating reason, and making the absurd leap to belief in God. Here, Barth resembles somewhat Kierkegaard.
Chapter 5: the Coming Man
The new man is the subject of which faith is the predicate. Seen humanly he is merely negation. The known, human man, must enter into a state of peace, which is to say a proper relation with God. The new man is a promise, not a reality.
Moreover, the man of faith cannot be recognized, either by his external or internal happiness.
Death enters the world through sin; sin is the negation of the righteousness of Christ. the law serves to draw us back to the sense of sin and, perversely enough, to our relation to God, however shattered. The fall is not caused by a single act; rather, it is the presupposition of all history. Likewise, the revelation of the new man in Jesus is not the revelation of a single individual; rather, it is the revelation of “the” new personality, the new man.
Transformation occurs where sin and catastrophe are present.
Chapter 6: Grace
Everything is transformed in the moment, which is outside of time. However, we live in sin, which is to say that we necessarily level the difference between man and god. Grace is forgiveness of this.
The sacrament of baptism is a means to grace. It points beyond us to another reality. In it, the new man is born. We must die to sin in order to be born to grace; we must utterly negate the present to have a glimpse of the future. Grace is obedience, grace is self-abnegation, grace is the impossibility which is the end of man. Etc.
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