Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche asserts that humanity must learn to live without seeking comfort in supernatural power. Nietzsche believes that faith in God, particularly when it takes a Christian form, devalues life.
Unlike Mircea Eliade, who rules out the return to cyclical time, characteristic of archaic ontology, Nietzsche proposes a modern reinterpretation of the Greek myth of eternal return. Nietzsche believes his doctrine of the eternal recurrence will usher in willful freedom from the dictates of conventional morality associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Nietzsche on Christ
Contrary to popular belief, Nietzsche holds no personal antipathy towards Jesus Christ. This becomes apparent when he contrasts “corrupt” Pauline Christianity to Christ’s own teaching. And after all it was Nietzsche who said, “in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”
Nietzsche’s strong objection to Christianity stems from his views on morality. He stands opposed to metaphysical assumptions which shift emphasis from the real world to an uncorroborated ideal realm, be it in the shape of the Platonic world of forms or the Judeo-Christian afterlife. Nietzsche believes man has only one task in life, which is to live. But he wants man to live passionately, though for him a life of passion is perhaps best exemplified by that of the artist like the German composer Richard Wagner, whom Nietzsche admired.
Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche’s rejection of metaphysics and of being as opposed to becoming leads him to deny moral facts. For him nothing is intrinsically good or bad without consideration of context. He argues that morality originated when people began to associate “good” with what they found beneficial, and “bad” with what they considered harmful.
Nietzsche, however, goes on to affirm that to deny that moral judgments are based on truths does not mean that some acts conventionally considered good should not be encouraged and some considered bad should not be avoided. Nevertheless, Nietzsche rejects absolutism in morality which would require both the strong and the weak, or as he prefers to call them, “the noble” and “the heard” to subscribe to the same ethical standards.
Morality and Christian Ethics
Nietzsche does not explicitly deny a place to the morality of the herd. What he strongly objects to is the imposition of herd morality on the noble. He says that a code of ethics which extols pity, selflessness and humility can be useful only to the herd who lack the strength of character to impose their will on others. The overman, the Goethe or Napoleon, has the noble virtues of will, passion and strength of character.
The herd can have their God and Christian morality as long as they let the nobles live by their aristocratic code. In fact, he thinks religion has proved useful in taming the ignorant multitude just as the “dogmatic” Socrates saved the Athenian “rabble” from self-extinction through his “decadent” formula that equates reason with virtue and virtue with happiness. Nietzsche suggests that Christianity is now repeating the favour by making the promise of life in another world without which the contemporary herd cannot persevere.
Commonalty with Eliade
Nietzsche shares with Eliade the view that archaic humanity — in Nietzsche’s terminology, the Dionysian — participated in mythical time in order to justify tragic life and abolish history.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche identifies two opposing but at the same time complementary impulses within ancient Greek culture in the forms of the Apollonian and Dionysian. While the former represents the rational, sober attitudes of the culture the latter symbolizes the more powerful instinctual drives. These two impulses blend together to produce Attic Greek tragedy. The Apollonian gives form and structure to the orgiastic Dionysian music and dance which manifests itself in the performance of the Greek Satyr Chorus.
Nietzsche argues Greek society finds consolation for life’s tragedy by identifying itself with the chorus and getting elevated to mythic time to become one with nature. Nietzsche further argues that Attic tragedy helps the Greek periodically to abolish time, known as world history, in order to escape from the absurd aspects of existence.
Unlike Eliade who embraces Christianity as the religion of the fallen humankind which is irredeemably identified with history and progress, Nietzsche sticks with his Dionysian hero to the end and rejects Christianity and its ethics.
Eternal Recurrence
Nietzsche reverts to the myth of the eternal recurrence, which he now equates with a Dionysian affirmation of life. Dionysus, the god of fertility, wine, and intoxication who was dismembered and became whole again, represents a personality who would be intensely alive to destruction and loss and, at the same time, an ecstatic.
Simply put, the doctrine of eternal recurrence perceives life as infinite cycle of events and asserts that whatever can happen must have already happened. As heard from the mouth of the animals who beseech Zarathustra to rise from bed and embrace his destiny as the teacher of the eternal recurrence, “all things recur eternally, and we ourselves too; and that we have already existed an eternal number of times, and all things with us.”
The basic import of his doctrine is the assertion that if you like any aspect of life and affirm it by wanting to experience it again, then you are also asking for the unpleasant elements in life to occur again because the two are entangled. In any case, it cannot be otherwise because the life one experiences is the one that recurs eternally.
Sources:
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth Of Tragedy. Trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: UP of Oxford, 1997.
- Walter Kaufmann Ed. and Trans. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Penguin, 1968.
