Nietzsche and the reinvention of the human
If you were told that in a cycle of endless recurrence you’d live out your life exactly as it is in every aspect and every event, every pain and every joy, over and over again for all eternity, would the prospect fill you with elation or despair?
This was the challenge that Friedrich Nietzsche threw in the face of the age-old philosophical debate in the Western canon about free will vs determinism, to define what it means to be human.
Plato opted for free will, asserting that we ought to be guided by the Good, an eternal ideal, so as not to be held in the human bondage of emotion and desire. But wouldn’t the diktat of the Good itself be a form of higher bondage, of determinism?
Two thousand years later, Kant would advocate free will as well, with the caveat that all our actions must be such that they should be of universal application, a proviso which afforded backdoor entry to determinism. He took the radical view that we are constrained always to tell the truth, even if that makes us accessory to murder.
In Vedantic teaching, the concept of karm – we make ourselves what we are through what we have done – sets a limit to free will through the consequences of our past deeds and misdeeds.
Beginning with his famous assertion that God is dead, science and secularism having undermined Christian dogma, Nietzsche attempted to devise a moral compass beyond the traditional polarity of good and evil.
Calling free will ‘crass stupidity’ invented by religious authoritarianism to guilt-trip humanity into the slave mentality of submission, he called for a revolutionary ‘revaluation of values’ dependent not on divine dispensation but on our own innate will to power, power not to dominate others but to dominate oneself, to achieve self-mastery and evolve into the Ubermensch (the Overman).
In his seminal 1883 work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra , which is an aphoristic prose poem rather than a philosophic treatise, Nietzsche outlined the three stages of the path to the reinvention of humanity: the Camel, burdened with imposed values; the Lion, fierce fighter for freedom; the Child, reborn as a life-affirming individual, a triumphant yea-sayer, with no hope of heaven, no fear of hell, prepared to endure the triumphs and tragedies of earthly life even in the face of an imagined eternity of endless recurrence.
As a young man, Zarathustra – the fictive name derived from Zoroaster, the founder of Zoroastrianism, one of the world’s earliest religions – retreats into a mountain fastness and returns to the world of men to spread his revelatory message of a new way of thought and life for humanity to achieve the ultimate goal of the Ubermensch, not in the hereafter, but in the here and now.
This exaltation of the Ubermensch, hijacked and perverted by the Nazis, has been misunderstood in popular lore and caused Nietzsche to be traduced as a crypto-fascist, although he was a lifelong critic of National Socialism and anti-Semitism.
Besieged as the world is today by the mass madness of war along religious battle lines, perhaps we need to rediscover Nietzsche, if only to remind ourselves that what we call humanity is still a work in progress.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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