Safe and warm and dry: part 2

Image credit: Edvard Munch, A portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1906

part 2 of a series

P ∧ ¬P

where ∧ represents logical conjunction (AND)

Editors’ note: The author of this rattle would seem to have adopted Nietzsche’s sometime habit of eschewing normal publishing practice (headings, subheadings and the like) and instead writing in numbered sections, each in vague relation to the other, if any relation is to be found (much as in, for example, The Gay Science). Rather than having endless and unhelpful discussions (we might say, given our experience with the author, ‘disputes’) as to compositional and orthographic practice, we have opted to publish the manuscript as received (contractual obligations being entailed).

However, we feel it necessary to advise the reader of the following: This rattle is inordinately long and tiresome; time might be better spent in other pursuits. Further, this publication in no way represents the opinions of the Editors, expressed or implied. Insofar as anything rising to the level of thought may be discerned or inferred, they are the author’s own.

An anthologist can easily re-create Nietzsche in his own image, even as writers of the lives of Jesus present us, perhaps as often as not, with wishful self-portraits. Doubtless Nietzsche has attracted crackpots and villains, but perhaps the percentage is no higher than in the case of Jesus. As Maritain has said: “If books were judged by the bad uses man can put them to, what book has been more misused than the Bible?”

– Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche (London: Penguin Books, 1954), 1–2.

1.

The gauntlet. –To the consternation of the Apologists, you selected none of their options, most notably suicide. Instead, your latent curiosity (and, to be honest, ire) was piqued. What to do?

You’re not entirely unfamiliar with their Prophet. You have vague memories of reading bits of his utterances, perhaps in some Introduction to Philosophy course at your fourth-tier university, taught by a faculty adjunct who moonlighted at MacDonald’s to make ends meet, poor choices as to career having been made.

Your hippocampus triggered, additional memories assert themselves: Kant, Kant, you remember having muttered, the name says it all. (Nietzsche agrees.) Kierkegaard? The obscurity that leadeth unto death… God but you hated that course, as you were at university to learn a marketable trade (perhaps hospitality management or finance), and the class was taught by a dope. (And rumors were, something worse than a dope–in a way Nietzsche would have endorsed.)

Shaking away mental eruptions (over which you have no control), you reset yourself. Vague memories are not fit for purpose, you think, dutifulness ensuing, as you are nothing if not dutiful. And so, implementing the imperative, Lest I be thought stupid by those like me, you buy The Portable Nietzsche.1 Skipping the introduction, you get right to it, picking up the glove laid down (read more Nietzsche)–without accepting the claim that you are a Christian in fact. Thus you commit yourself to reading 100 pages of the volume, on the assumption that such a number would be a representative sample of a 700 page compendium. And, your dutifulness goes only so far….

2.

All the things. –It quickly becomes apparent to you that the Prophet had a lot to say about a lot of things. Nearly all of them: ethics (“what the philosophers call character is an incurable disease”); the ancient Greeks (enamored of their “tigerish lust to annihilate”); success (“stupidity, wickedness, laziness, etc.” important factors thereof); truth (“illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are”); girls dreams (“Inexperienced girls flatter themselves with the notion that it is within their power to make a man happy”); marriage (probably requires “a natural aid: concubinage”); war (“man emerges from it stronger for good and evil”); the apostle Paul (“the persecutor of God”); teachers (“a necessary evil, an evil to be kept as small as possible”); pre-marital sex by “girls” (“what is really contemptible in this girl is the weakness of her fear”); the reabsorption of semen by the blood (“the strongest nourishment”)…. It goes on and on. And on.

Occasionally he makes what would seem to be an attempt at a joke: “The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk.”

And Christianity, of course. He had a lot to say about that, none of it especially flattering. Among other things, he called it “a metaphysics of the hangman”.2 Which … right?

Maybe, you surmise, that’s why the Apologists are so fond of their prophet. He took his opinions as seriously as they take theirs, sharing a common obsession.

3.

Ecce homo. –What ever did the Apologists expect you to make of a dead German with deliberately obnoxious opinions on so many topics, who betrayed no concern for intelligibility or coherence? Whose autobiography is given a Johanine title3 and contains such grandiose chapter titles as “Why I am so wise”, “Why I am so clever” and “Why I write such good books”? Who took to writing various heads of state, signing his letters “Dionysus”, “Christ”, “Caesar”? Who traded in incendiary concepts: Übermensch, will to power, the overcoming? Who declares a coming apocalypse that he alone can see–and welcomes? (Is trying to catalyze, you think.) In short, the writings of a psychotic?

Maybe they didn’t really expect you to actually read more of him, accepting instead their readings.

A common explanation for everything Nietzsche–from his physical maladies, peculiar behavior, to his copious writings–is that he was suffering from dementia related to syphilitic infection, an almost default diagnosis for mental illness in his day, one more cultural than medical.4 A more plausible diagnosis has been offered in recent times, bipolar affective disorder, though other diagnoses are possible.5

Whatever the etiology, the Prophet showed signs of mental imbalance throughout his life, from persistent headaches as a boy to periods of depression followed by manic bursts in adulthood. Writing to a friend in 1871, having just completed The Birth of Tragedy, he notes, “In addition to many depressed moods and half moods, I have also had a few quite elated ones and have given some sign of this in the small work I mentioned.”6

Following his collapse in 1889, the Prophet was briefly committed to an asylum in Jena, before being remanded to his mother’s care. Hospital records document “huge appetite and hyperorality (including drinking his own urine), sexual disinhibition, rages alternating with periods of apathy, and hypermetamorphosis (compulsion to react to visual stimuli).”7

Yeah, you think, everyone should definitely read more of that maniac. And, having done so, admit of false consciousness (and so come to hate yourself), or become the most horrible vision of yourself you can imagine (a monster), or … kill youself.

I wonder, you wonder, how many angst ridden adolescents have taken William Lane Craig’s grim first option? Would he even care?

Good job, Apologists.

4.

A horse tale. –Here’s a sad story often told:

Early in January 1889 Nietzsche, then in Turin, saw a coachman flog a horse, rushed toward the horse, and collapsed with his arms around it. He was carried home, and, after recovering consciousness, wrote and mailed a number of letters which mirror the sudden outbreak of his madness. They are the last meaningful things he wrote.8

This version is from an exegete who salvaged the Prophet’s reputation in the English speaking West, Walter Kaufmann. One might say The Exegete. His 1950 book, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist was an apologia and  “brought about a radical reversal of the popular image of Nietzsche as a ranting, totalitarian anti-Semite and gradually made it possible for philosophers, who had long ago dismissed Nietzsche as a mere ‘poet’ or ‘prophet,’ to take him seriously once again.”9 Lesser Exegetes dutifully repeated (and continue to repeat) the story, some adding sobs and tears to the account for effect. Not unlike accounts of Jesus’ post-execution activities; elaborations are added over time to grace the tale.

If true, it might well be the only instance of Nietzsche showing sympathy for the suffering of a fellow creature.

But of course, it is not, at least so far as the flogging (and sympathy) are concerned. The primary source for Nietzsche’s collapse in Turin’s Piazza Carlo Alberto comes from an anonymous journalist who interviewed the Prophet’s landlord, Mr. Fino in 1900–fully 11 years after Nietzsche’s death. Mr. Fino reported that he had heard the story from a policeman (also unnamed). It goes like this:

One day when Mr. Fino was walking along the nearby Via Po — one of the main streets of Turin — he saw a group of people drawing near and in their midst were two municipal guards accompanying “the professor.” As soon as Nietzsche saw Fino he threw himself into his arms, and Fino easily obtained his release from the guards, who said that they found that foreigner outside the university gates, clinging tightly to the neck of a horse and refusing to let it go.10

In that account there is no coachman, no flogging, no tears.

5.

The case of Wagner. –Among the Nietzsche literati, his break with the composer Richard Wagner is much discussed … with little agreement as to cause or significance. Some, perhaps the majority, acknowledge the lifelong obsession but consider it an odd and distracting personality quirk, one that only weakened otherwise magisterial feats of thought such as The Birth of Tragedy.11 Others assert that “Wagner was the central philosophical and artistic problem of Nietzsche’s project as a whole” and make their case at book length.12

An alternative explanation of the falling out is decidedly less cerebral than Nietzsche, in his published attacks on the Composer (The Case of Wagner and Contra Wagner), might lead you to believe. An explanation that might be delicately characterized as … earthy.

For context, it must be noted that the Prophet, throughout his adult life, suffered from all manner of physical maladies (setting aside the mental sort): gastrointestinal distress, crushing headaches, failing eyesight. Perhaps that’s the price of ascending to the third prophetic heaven and suffering a thorn thrust in the side by a malign entity, as with one of his nemeses, St. Paul.13 However that may be, suffer he did, ever finding himself dependent on the ministrations of friends and family to manage the entailments.

Further to context, the Prophet for quite some time was famous friends with not only the Composer, but his wife, Cosima. A frequent guest at their home in Tribschen between 1869 and 1872, Nietzsche became nearly a member of the family. And families come to know each other intimately, sometimes with the assistance of servants, their ears ever at doors, busy with cleaning the water closets, washing the linens.

In autumn of 1876, the Prophet traveled to Sorrento, where he intersected with the Wagners (though not sharing lodgings). During that interlude, the Composer became particularly concerned about the state of his young friend’s health. His eyesight in particular. Concern so great, in fact, that he wrote the Prophet’s doctor, one Otto Eiser, to suggest an etiology:

In assessing N.’s condition, I have long been reminded of identical or very similar experiences with young men of great intellectual ability. Seeing them laid low by similar symptoms, I discovered all too certainly that these were the effects of masturbation. Ever since I observed N. closely, guided by such experiences, all his traits of temperament and characteristic habits have transformed my fear into a conviction.14

In his reply, the good doctor explored other potential causes (“gonorrheal infections during his student days”) or contravening indications (“our patient does not lack the capacity for satisfying the sexual urge in a normal manner; a circumstance which, though not inconceivable in masturbators of bis age, is not the general rule”), but in the end concured with Wagner’s suspicions:

I concede that my objections are all far from watertight and open to rebuttal by your long and exhaustive observation of our friend. I am bound to accept your assumption all the more readily because I, too, am led by many aspects of N.’s comportment and behavior to regard it as only too credible. … Such pathological irritability of the nerve centers can most certainly be brought into a direct causal nexus with the sexual sphere, so the solving of the masturbation question would here have a most important bearing on diagnosis—although, given the well-known tenacity of the vice, I myself would be dubious of any method of treatment and its success.15

Somehow (accounts differ) the news leaked. The Prophet’s vice became a topic of gossip at the Bayreuth Festival of 1882, where Wagner’s final work, Parsifal, was debuted. Though no evidence indicates Nietzsche attended the festival, he learned of his embarrassment. Writing to a friend in April 1873:

Wagner is rich in malicious ideas, but what do you say to his having exchanged letters on the subject (even with my doctors) to voice his belief that my altered way of thinking was a consequence of unnatural excesses, with hints at pederasty?16

And that was that. As Wagner’s biographer has it, “Wagner knew too much, and Nietzsche knew that he knew. … The barb implanted by Wagner’s correspondence with Eiser had penetrated too deeply for the wound to heal, even after Wagner’s death.”17

6.

The apocalypticist. –Perhaps the Apologists urge you to “read more Nietzsche” because he was a prophet of an apocalypse he imagined, just as the Apologists’ worship a deity who also prophesied an apocalypse of his own imagination, the promised Parousia, the kingdom that tarries–interminably. Familiar terrain. A hammer and an anvil, you the object to be shaped.

Apocalypticists, you think. Adolescents with pens.

Unless the Apologist’s deity wasn’t an apocalypticist? You ponder, happening to know people who call themselves “Jesus followers”–some still believing, others not–who deny (or downplay) any apocalyptic component to him (Him?). There’s no apocalyptic prophet here, they claim. His message was one of love and service to others. Period. And fine. Historically dubious, but fine.

Maybe (in some elaborations), he was a wandering Cynic philosopher (one of the many Greek philosophical traditions). Maybe something of a Stoic (see Marcus Areulius). The kingdom wasn’t a real kingdom (however his poor peasant hearers might have understood it–including, apparently, his disciples– desperately longing to show Rome the eschatological door)–it was a sapiental kingdom. Sigh. So, a banal ethicist. Nothing in that evidenced in any Jewish tradition of the time, however Hellenized. Anything to keep him from being … a Jew of his time. But fine, if that’s to someone’s taste. Better than fine, in fact; you always score it a gain for humanity when religionists cease taking their ideologies seriously.

And you have no dog in that hunt, other concerns being more pressing, like your mortgage payment.

But, you note, the Apologists are more hard-boiled, reading the texts with a grim literalism and as presented, historical contingency be damned. They over-egg no pudding. They brook no limp metaphorizing, however troubling the ensuing ramifications. They will have their apocalypse, they will have their separation of wheat from tares (the latter to be burned), they will have their inerrant authority. In the 21st century, they will have their desert god’s Iron Age morality.  And they will have your submission … or death (now or later, preferably the former, whichever choice you opt for).

The Apologists know how to do God-splaying, while the Jesus followers keep their legs primly closed.

7.

Christian love. –A thought occurs to you, through no fault of your own (you didn’t ask for it…): Don’t Christians realize that the love they bang on about has a predicate: judgement, condemnation–a blood debt requiring repayment? That the love of their beloved god is necessary because their beloved god is subject to a deeper requirement–retribution? Some weird demand that he (as it’s always a ‘he’ in their tradition, unlike most others) is himself subject to?

Thinking more deeply: Whoever came up with atonement theology got one thing right. Life, as we know it, requires death. Predation is the rule, and Christianity is the highest instantiation of that mournful principle. The herd quiets when the necessary sacrifice has been extracted on this blood-soaked Earth, by a god who is powerless to cancel debts but must repay them.

A jaundiced eye often sees most clearly.

8.

Pretzel logic. –It is Nietzsche’s inscrutability that, like the Holy Writ, invites all manner of exegetical ingenuity. Alexander Nehamas, an esteemed Nietzsche scholar (and a self-proclaimed Nietzschean) posed for himself a morally troubling question: Does Nietzsche approve of ‘Hitler?’18 After seventeen pages of rigorous self evaluation (that sort of honesty often lauded by Nietzsche), Nehamas concludes:

Is Nietzsche’s philosophy, then, admirable? No, to the extent that it refuses to reject the evil hero unconditionally. Yes, because it gives us itself the nonmoral means to reject its refusal. It therefore prompts, like everything in life, including morality, a No and a Yes. In refuting it, we affirm it. Its error is a testament to its truth.19

A moral position can be taken on a completely amoral basis. That’s at least as neat a trick as William Lane Craig’s justification of the slaughter of the Canaanites on the basis of “divine command theory”–an immoral position can be taken on a moral basis.20

9.

The Exegetes. –Perhaps nothing endorses the Prophet’s critique of Western culture more than the hemorrhage of critical literature devoted to his exegesis. The bleeding has not been staunched; it continues today, at an accelerating pace. The endeavor is rabbinic both in scope and result: little agreement is to be found.

Do the Exegetes not understand that the Prophet mocked efforts at … systematization? “I mistrust all systematists and avoid them. The will to system is a lack of integrity.”21 If understanding can be measured in pages, apparently not.

  • On morality. –Was he an immoralist, as he so often claimed, or simply objecting to a particular morality, that of the weak Christian herd–slave morality–projecting its fears and ressentiments by declaring the strong “evil” and itself “good”? Maybe. Then again, maybe not: “Nietzsche’s immoralism! A host of problems and many interpretations live together under this roof.”22
  • On epistemology. –What might he have to say about truth and its knowability? Some utterances seem to reject the very notion of truth: “Against positivism, which goes no further than the phenomenon and says, ‘there are only facts’, I would say: no, facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations… Hence ‘perspectivism.’”23 And, “we have not any organ at all for knowing, or for “truth….’”24 (Postmodernists love that sort of talk.)

    But of course, things are not so clear: “Considerable hope exists, and much conviction, that Nietzsche has something important to say about truth. This study begins with the problem that confronts anyone with such hopes, namely, that Nietzsche’s claims about truth seem hopelessly confused and contradictory.”25
  • On eternal recurrence of the same. –A cosmological argument or a thought experiment? Exegetes disagree: “Nietzsche himself suggests that the eternal recurrence was his most important thought, but that has not made it any easier for commentators to understand.”26 The idea occurred to him on a walk in the Swiss alps, in a moment of elation; a sense of sameness “not unusual in migraine sufferers.”27
  • On fascism. –What of his responsibility for the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany? Was he the philosopher of the Third Reich? Depends on who you ask: “These issues are not as clear-cut as they may seem, and … have attracted much polemical heat….”28
  • On the self. –What might Nietzsche have to say about your favorite subject, yourself? Well, fair guess that if Nietzsche knew you as an individual, his opinion would be pretty much in line with the Apologists’ (not good). But as relates to the more abstract topic of “the self” (or “psyche” or “soul”) whole tomes have been written, starting with such conundrums as, “whereas Nietzsche often argues that the self is but some kind of fictive entity, his own normative project seems to require a substantive notion of selfhood.”29 The exegetes struggle to resolve this “tension,” without, apparently, succumbing to “the feeling of worthlessness … produced by the realization that the overall character of human existence may not be interpreted with the concepts ‘purpose,’ ‘unity,’ or ‘truth’.”30

    The Prophet certainly seems to understand himself as a real, instantiated self (read his letters) of the best sort (read his autobiography). Others have also recognized a self in him, one which “obviously had forty different kinds of inferiority complex.”31

The manifest of opacity could be extended almost indefinitely. One can imagine Nietzsche enjoying the confusion from his current perch (however that may be characterized: ouranic, chthonic, post-ontogenic); he was only interested in being understood by those with ears to hear:

The question of intelligibility. –One not only wants to be understood when one writes, but also—quite as certainly—not to be understood. It is by no means an objection to a book when someone finds it unintelligible: perhaps this might just have been the intention of its author, perhaps he did not want to be understood by “anyone.” A distinguished intellect and taste, when it wants to communicate its thoughts, always selects its hearers; by selecting them, it at the same time closes its barriers against “the others.”32

The exegetes remind you of nothing more than of a certain group of camels, imagined by a certain poet, on a particular journey: a galled, sore-footed, refractory bunch. Would that the herd find a more useful path to plod. Like maybe a fairway. Easier on the hooves.

10.

This most uncanny of all guests. –But nihilism … surely there’s agreement that nihilism was a central theme of the Prophet. And general agreement on that point does seem to be the rule. Beyond that, confusion reigns:

As a multifaceted phenomenon with affective, cognitive, and socio-cultural components, however, it has proven surprisingly difficult to offer a comprehensive account of what exactly the problem of nihilism is for Nietzsche—and, therefore, what potential solutions to this problem could look like. In part, this difficulty follows from the fact that, while something properly called “the problem of nihilism” animates and permeates so many of Nietzsche’s most critical works, he rarely calls this problem by its name: Nihilismus. Thus, though one happens upon possible symptoms or consequences of this problem in nearly every one of Nietzsche’s works—one senses the specter of nihilism at every turn—a comprehensive account of nihilism remains difficult to construct.33

You sigh. Fortunately for you (as your patience–if not your iritation–is nearly spent), the Apologists have a narrow focus: their concern is with souls (clearly not with cognition, and society will be taken care of in due course). The death of God has affective consequences for individuals. If you’re to be honest, you must find a Godless life meaningless, you must, at some point, recognize the parched desert you inhabit and seek relief (in one form or another). Any other conclusion is evidence of false consciousness, inauthenticity, cognitive bias (which you wear like rose-colored glasses)! In short, nihilism is the only honest emotional response.

But which sort of nihilism? The Prophet speaks of two species, the weak and the strong. “Nihilism as a decline and retrogression of mental power: passive nihilism” in contrast to “Nihilism as a sign of an increase in mental power, as active nihilism . . .”34 The Apologists are fine with either result in your nihilistic journey: despair (leading to conversion or suicide) or self aggrandizement (no rules applying). Their goal would seem to be converting your nihilistic journey to a spiritual one–with a single destination.

From your dutiful studies (more dutiful than you intended), you have to acknowledge that the Apologists seem to fairly represent the Prophet’s etiology and diagnosis of the dis-ease (nihilism), the former being the death of god, the latter “a psychological condition is bound to arise when we have sought a ‘meaning’ in all that occurs which is not to be found.”35 As concerns the cure, their paths sharply diverge.

Done and dusted, you think, with considerable relief. Time to catch butterflies.

Except, maybe it’s complicated. The most cited exegetical excavation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of nihilism is Bernard Reginster’s The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. It is characterized by such words as “seminal” and “magisterial.” Reginster argues, with ponderous authority, that Nietzsche detailed two sorts of nihilism: that of disorientation and that of despair.

The nihilism of disorientation comes about when one realizes that the objective backing for one’s deepest moral beliefs has been lost. “According to nihilism as disorientation, there is nothing wrong with the world and something wrong with our values.”36 This is the nihilism that the Apologists find in their reading of the Prophet: the secular age has killed God.

The nihilism of despair has to do with a negative evaluation of the world, finding it lacking with respect to perfectly serviceable values. “According to nihilism as despair, by contrast, there is nothing wrong with our values but something wrong with the world.”37 This is the nihilism that the Apologists inhabit in their theology: “We know that we are God’s children, and that the whole world lies under the power of the evil one.”38

So, you think, what to think about all that?

To start, you don’t know a lot of people wandering around in nihilistic disorientation, but you recognize your limited experience as anecdotal. All the recent articles, studies, opinion pieces you read about social disengagement, dislocation, loneliness etc. would tend to suggest a fair amount of disorientation. Though, you think, typically attributed more to the rise of social media than to any death. Except for some Christian op-ed writers (idiots, you spit), whose suggested cure implies a religious cause requiring a religious cure: “Just go to church, guys.”39 Gawd. If someone got the squirts, Christians will attribute it to their secularism.

But fine, you’ll concede the point if only to be sooner done with this tiresome intellectual engagement, about which you feel a rising ressentiment.

What of the world-condemning nihilism of despair? Where is that flavor to be found in greatest abundance? Maybe in the cultural heirs of Jewish apocalypticism? The most conservative of those heirs, who have their apocalyptic texts and take them seriously?

So Orthodox Jews breed flawless red heifers (with the help of evangelical Texas ranchers) on the site of the Tabernacle in Shiloh, in preparation for consecration of the Third Temple and the appearance of the Messiah.40 So ISIS tries to lure the infidels to their defeat in Dabiq, thus catalyzing their apocalypse.41 So the Apologists and their evangelical collaborators spread their evangelion globally to catalyze the return of their “evangel”42 and the establishment of his kingdom, with its large, white throne of retribution.43

The Prophet seems not to have considered this possibility. Who knew that Abrahamic sorts could grow an apocalyptic spine? Who would have predicted a will to power arising from the weak herd that, tired of munching grass and waiting, kicks up a cloud of dust and stampedes to get apocalyptic shit done.

Maybe they read more Nietzsche: “Nihilism is not merely a state of contemplativeness about everything having been ‘in vain!’, nor is it merely the belief that all that exists deserves to be destroyed; the nihilist takes matters into his own hands and destroys.”44

Nietzsche, it might be offered, came by his apocalyptic vision honestly, the venom running deep. He was, after all, the son of a Lutheran pastor.

11.

The madman. –Oh but the Apologists do love parables, being so familiar with them. They intimate flourishing (unless you were born on a path, a rocky place or in a thorn bush…). Yet another reason to recommend the Prophet for your reading: he wrote a really good parable that encapsulates their abhorrence of the disenchanted society they want to dismantle, soul by soul.

To refresh your memory…

the parable of the madman

The madman – Haven’t you heard of that madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly, ‘I’m looking for God! I’m looking for God!’ Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing around together just then, he caused great laughter. Has he been lost, then? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone to sea? Emigrated? – Thus they shouted and laughed, one interrupting the other. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Where is God?’ he cried; ‘I’ll tell you! We have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? Isn’t night and more night coming again and again? Don’t lanterns have to be lit in the morning? Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition? – Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves? Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? There was never a greater deed – and whoever is born after us will on account of this deed belong to a higher history than all history up to now!’ Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; they too were silent and looked at him disconcertedly. Finally he “threw his lantern on the ground so that it broke into pieces and went out. ‘I come too early’, he then said; ‘my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder need time; the light of the stars needs time; deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen and heard. This deed is still more remote to them than the remotest stars – and yet they have done it themselves!’ It is still recounted how on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there started singing his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but, ‘What then are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?

What do you notice first? Maybe that it’s not a parable? It’s an allegory, with simple, one-to-one correspondences in the cast of characters. The madman is … take a guess. The dead god is … whatever God is supposed to be. The townspeople mocking the madman are the happy atheists who haven’t collapsed into nihilistic despair following the theocide (think Denmark). And the church folk are the still-pious who show the madman the church door, resuming their services.

It would appear that the Apologists might want to take their own advice (read more Nietzsche). They might find that the death of God need not be a cause of despair–quite the contrary.

Are we still, perhaps, too much under the immediate effects of the event [the death of God]—and are these effects, especially as regards ourselves, perhaps the reverse of what was to be expected—not at all sad and depressing, but rather like a new and indescribable variety of light, happiness, relief, enlivenment, encouragement, and dawning day? . . . In fact, we philosophers and “free spirits” feel ourselves irradiated as by a new dawn by the report that the “old God is dead”; our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation. At last the horizon seems open once more, granting even that it is not bright; our ships can at last put out to sea in face of every danger; every hazard is again permitted to the discerner; the sea, our sea, again lies open before us; perhaps never before did such an “open sea” exist.—45

12.

The true prophet. –What are we to make of Nietzsche as a prophet? In fact, Nietzsche never explicitly claimed that designation, but he went a long way toward implying it: “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what is inevitable: the rise of nihilism.”46

The next two centuries, you think (doing some quick math, somewhat nervously). He wrote that sometime in the 1880s, so that would include … now. Genius!

The world has never lacked for prophets, from those of the Hebrew Bible to the Delphic oracle to Horace, Virgil, John of Patmos–to those of the New Apostolic Restoration, which seems to hatch new prophets in numbers rivaling spring nymphs on a trout stream.

So the question would seem to be, was Nietzsche a true prophet? Many point to the rise of National Socialism in Germany as a vindication of Nietzsche’s predictive prowess, and it must be admitted that his concept of the Übermensch was embraced by Nazis. Mussolini found in him a mentor. One might ask whether Nietzsche predicted fascism or incited it. But, as with everything about the madman, it’s a matter of interminable dispute.

For the purpose of discussion, stipulate that Nietzsche anticipated the rise of fascism and the resulting World War. He then might be considered a true prophet. But only in part: most of Europe did not march to the fascist drum in the first half of the 20th century, and since then has settled quite comfortably into a soft secularism.

And why might that have been? Maybe because (unlike the Apologists, who are nothing if not certain) Western cultures–England in particular–endorsed an intellectual posture that embraced uncertainty. “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”47

An ounce of epistemic humility prevents…

13.

The law of the excluded middle. –Far from excluding the middle, Nietzsche delights in asserting it (having little use for logic). It is not a matter of P or NOT P (P∨¬P), but P and NOT P (P∧¬P), a No and a Yes. Or perhaps, neither P and NOT P, beyond good and evil. Your very notion of P is nothing more than your answer to some deep psychological need, bearing no relation to truth. The Prophet’s famous “perspectivism.”

One wonders why he wore spectacles.

It strikes you that Nietzsche’s contemptuous disregard for logical rigor goes some way to explaining the Apologists’ attraction to the inscrutable Prophet. They also seem to have a casual relationship to logic, one easily abandoned when in a pinch. Why has Jesus’ return been so long delayed when thought to be so imminent by his contemporary followers? A day is like a thousand years to God. Why so much unnecessary suffering in the world? [S]hould a mortal, timebound, finite creature really be so certain that we can know right now what earthly suffering looks like in the light of eternity? And if not, shouldn’t that dose of humility put some limit on how completely we rule out God’s perfect goodness?48 Why does the Holy Writ contain instructions and commands that seem patently unjust (like the treatment of slaves or stoning of refractory children): God’s justice is not our justice; divine command theory.

¬P to mere mortals, P to the perfectly P-ish deity.

Do the Apologists take what they’re selling seriously–beyond their ridiculous assertions? Have any of them a) abandoned their families to follow their evangel, b) sold all their possessions and given them to the poor, c) advocated turning their cheek to ISIS d) taken no care for tomorrow? Of course not. Kingdom ethics comes the reply.

Maybe this explains the Apologists’ fixation: Nietzsche’s prose is often aphoristic rather than ratiocinative, and when attempting the latter, obscure. It allures rather than persuades in its urgency, is unreflective in its condemnations, affirms the primacy of power and relishes in it. It seeks to destroy this desertified secular existence and build anew. What is past must be swept away, has been swept away, for those with eyes to see. It speaks in inscrutable contradictions. It ascends to the highest heaven to hear the thunderings of a prophet, a new revelation, obvious in its magnificence.

What could be a more congenial sort of discourse for those weaned on the Holy Scriptures? As Nietzsche himself was.

You recall the options the Apologists have offered: They want their Prophet to send you into such affective despair that you’ll gladly agree to embrace the factuality of wheels within wheels, full of eyes!49 (conversion), to avoid the alternatives (teratosis50 or suicidal ideation). They cast a gleaming eye toward a magic kingdom, one you would rather avoid.

All in an effort to re-enchant the disenchanted world that all in the West (Apologists included) inhabit, even as they enjoy its happy accommodations.

One wonders why the Apologists wear spectacles.

To be charitable, the Apologists claim to care about you, your eternal fate–more for your soul than for your present mortal coil. Which they are happy to hammer away at (lacking any charity)–mocking the authenticity of your charity toward them (as you’re happy to let them believe whatever).

Or, maybe they’re piling up riches in heaven, spiritual scalps. Heaven might have haul quotas (“I will make you fishers of men”). The bait is the included middle–at whatever cost of intellectual integrity–which reveals the enchanted oasis in the desert of this secular age, the only possibility of real flourishing. Your recalcitrance amounts to “secular humanist” confirmation bias.

14.

Epilogue. –Once, long ago, you had dinner with a priest. He happened to be a gay priest, raised Catholic but condemned as ideologically required, so took the priesthood under the Episcopal banner, its via media offering safe harbor. He “came out” from behind the Canterbury Pulpit, a brave public address in the nation’s house of prayer for all people. As the conversation ensued, you asked him, “Who would you rather meet in a dark alley (Washington DC being full of such alleys), a secular humanist or a Christian?” He paused. The pause lingered. The question answered itself in the asking.

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  1. Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche (Penguin Group, 1954). ↩︎
  2. Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, 30, 32, 39, 47, 59, 60, 61, 68, 71, 74, 75, 54, 500. ↩︎
  3. John 19:5, “Then Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. And Pilate said to them, “Behold the Man!” ↩︎
  4. The Jena asylum where he was confined for a time after his final collapse diagnosed 64% of its patients as having dementia related to syphilis. ↩︎
  5. E.g., Klüver–Bucy syndrome, a diencephalic tumour, a vascular lesion. See Eva Maria Cybulska, “The madness of Nietzsche: a misdiagnosis of the millennium?.” Hospital medicine 61,8 (2000): 571-5. doi:10.12968/hosp.2000.61.8.1403. ↩︎
  6. Christopher Middleton ed. and trans., Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (University of Chicago Press, 1969), 30. To Erwin Rohdele. ↩︎
  7. Cybulska, “The madness of Nietzsche,” 574. ↩︎
  8. Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, 684. ↩︎
  9. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, foreword by Alexander Nehamas (Princeton University Press: 1974), Foreword. ↩︎
  10. Chris Townsend, “Nietzsche’s Horse,” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 25. 2017, https://lareviewofbooks.org/blog/essays/nietzsches-horse/. ↩︎
  11. Friedrich, Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy/The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage, 1967), 98n. ↩︎
  12. Ryan Harvey and Aaron Ridley, Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2002). ↩︎
  13. See 2 Corinthians: 12:1-12. ↩︎
  14. Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century, trans. J. Maxwell Brownjohn (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 452. ↩︎
  15. Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner, 453. ↩︎
  16. Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner, 455. ↩︎
  17. Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner, 456. ↩︎
  18. ‘Hitler’ in quotation marks because Nehamas uses the name to stand for any evil hero. ↩︎
  19. Alexander Nehamas, “Nietzsche and ‘Hitler’”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 37,S1, (1999), 16. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-6962.1999.tb01790.x. ↩︎
  20. William Lane Craig, “#16 Slaughter of the Canaanites”, Richard Wagner,, August 06, 2007, https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/slaughter-of-the-canaanites. See also “William Lane Craig Defends the Canaanite Slaughter,” Alex O’Connor, Mar 17, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjsSHd23e0Q&t=1241s. ↩︎
  21. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford University Press, 1998), Maxims and Barbs 26. ↩︎
  22. Maudemarie Clark, “Nietzsche’s Immoralism and the Concept of Morality,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, ed. Richard Schacht (University of California Press, 1994), 4. ↩︎
  23. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: Selections from the Notebooks of the 1880s, trans. R. Kevin Hill and Michael A. Scarpitti, ed. R. Kevin Hill (Penguin Classics: 2017), §481. ↩︎
  24. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: or The Joyful Wisdom, trans. Thomas Common (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017), §354. ↩︎
  25. Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1. ↩︎
  26. R. Lanier Anderson, “Friedrich Nietzsche,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, §6.3, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/#SecoLite. ↩︎
  27. Cybulska “The madness of Nietzsche,” 573. ↩︎
  28. Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich eds., Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? (NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), Introduction. ↩︎
  29. Paul Katsafanas ed., The Nietzschean Mind (Routledge, 2018), Part III, The self. ↩︎
  30. As quoted in Kaitlyn Creasy, The Problem of Affective Nihilism in Nietzsche: Thinking Differently, Feeling Differently (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), 131. ↩︎
  31. Crane Brinton, Nietzsche (Harper & Row, 1941), 44. ↩︎
  32. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §381. ↩︎
  33. Kaitlyn Creasy, The Problem of Affective Nihilism in Nietzsche: Thinking Differently, Feeling Differently (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), 1. ↩︎
  34. Nietzsche, Will to Power, Part 1. Nihilism, §22. ↩︎
  35. Nietzsche, Will to Power, Part 1. Nihilism, §12(1). ↩︎
  36. Reginster, The Affirmation of Life, chapter 1, §4. ↩︎
  37. Ibid. ↩︎
  38. 1 John 5:19. ↩︎
  39. Ross Douthat, “Save the Mainline,” New York Times, April 15, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/opinion/sunday/save-the-mainline.html. ↩︎
  40. Lisa Loraine Baker, “What is the Meaning of Red Heifers in Bible Prophecy?,” Christianity.com, April 26, 2024, https://www.christianity.com/wiki/end-times/red-heifers-end-times-are-coming.html#google_vign. ↩︎
  41. Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” The Atlantic, March 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/. ↩︎
  42. A Nietzschean term for Jesus. ↩︎
  43. Revelation 20:11-15: “11 Then I saw a great white throne and the one who sat on it; the earth and the heaven fled from his presence, and no place was found for them. 12 And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Also another book was opened, the book of life. And the dead were judged according to their works, as recorded in the books. 13 And the sea gave up the dead that were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and all were judged according to what they had done. 14 Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire; 15 and anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.” ↩︎
  44. Nietzsche, Will to Power, Part 1. Nihilism, §24. ↩︎
  45. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §343. ↩︎
  46. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Preface §2. ↩︎
  47. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Prometheus, 1986), 43. ↩︎
  48.  Ross Douthat, “The Best Argument Against Having Faith in God,” New York Times, February 14, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/opinion/god-atheism-good-evil.html. ↩︎
  49. Ezekiel 10.10-12: “10 And as for their appearance, the four looked alike, something like a wheel within a wheel. 11 When they moved, they moved in any of the four directions without veering as they moved; but in whatever direction the front wheel faced, the others followed without veering as they moved. 12 Their entire body, their rims, their spokes, their wings, and the wheels—the wheels of the four of them—were full of eyes all round.” ↩︎
  50. Noun τέρας (teras), “monster” + suffix -ωσις (-osis) “a process or state of becoming”. A kind of rebirth…. ↩︎

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