—Osho
Education in those rulers' virtues that master even one's benevolence and pity: the great cultivator's virtues ('forgiving one's enemies' is child's play in comparison), the affect of the creator must be elevated—no longer to work on marble!— The exceptional situation and powerful position of those beings (compared with any prince hitherto): the Roman Caesar with Christ's soul.
—Nietzsche
1. Nietzsche's philosopher as the nature of man.
To begin with, here's roughly the first half of my "What Is Nietzsche's Sovereign Agent?":
I wrote: I have always found "Of the Sublime Ones" the most beautiful of Zarathustra's speeches. I associate it, by way of a mind-expanding experience, with the "lower form" of the Beatific Vision, on which Aleister Crowley writes:
"[I]t may be surmised that the Vision arises not from any given action but rather from a subtle suspension of action."¹
The connection between action and the will is not hard to establish. Thus George Grant said:
"That we must speak of two accounts of reason, the ancient and the modern, can be seen in the fact that for the ancients thought was at its height, not an action, but what they called a passion. Whatever the differences in what came to us from Jerusalem and from Athens, on this central point there was a commonness. The height for man was a passion. In modern language we might weakly describe this by saying that thought was finally a receptivity. We can see that this is not true of modern thought because its very form is the making of hypotheses and the testing by experiment, something intimately connected with the acts of our wills, the controlling of the world, the making of history."²
In fact, we find here the phrase "the acts of our wills", which Strauss also uses. (Before I get to that, however, let us note that Walter Kaufmann translates the phrase wollenden Subjekte from Will to Power nr. 569 as "active subjects".) Strauss uses the phrase "acts of the will to power" at the end of paragraph 8 of his "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil". And in paragraph 33, he says of the "action" of the philosopher of the future:
"As the act of the highest form of man's will to power the Vernatürlichung "["naturalization"] of man is at the same time the peak of the anthropomorphization of the non-human (cf. Will to Power nr. 614), for the most spiritual will to power consists in prescribing to nature what or how it ought to be (aph. 9). It is in this way that Nietzsche abolishes the difference between the world of appearance or fiction (the interpretations) and the true world (the text)."
Now in his Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, which changed me from a still somewhat Heideggerian Nietzschean into a Lampertian one, Laurence Lampert says of this passage:
"[Strauss] does not mean that the fundamental phenomenon, will to power, is itself an anthropomorphization. That point Strauss had already settled earlier in his essay where the theme was explicitly the will to power."³
It is true that Strauss's "what or how" may at this point be, not "what", but "how". Thus Heidegger wrote:
"The determination 'will to power' replies to the question of being with respect to the latter's constitution; the determination 'eternal recurrence of the same' replies to the question of being with respect to its way to be."⁴
At this point in Strauss's essay, the theme is indeed explicitly the eternal recurrence of the same, not the will to power. But why then does Strauss repeat that bit from paragraph 8, about the abolition of the fundamental difference? It is here, in the climactic paragraphs of Strauss's essay, that I cease to be a Lampertian Nietzschean.
[...]
Notes:
¹ Crowley, Little Essays toward Truth, "Beatitude". Note that I do not agree with Crowley's Rousseauan(?) harmonism: cf. Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and its Betrayal, page 38.
² Grant, "Time as History". I have combined the recorded lecture with the written text.
³ Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 100.
⁴ Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume II, chapter 26, translation Krell.
[...]
"The Vernatürlichung of man is the peak of the anthropomorphization of the non-human at the same time as it is what?", I hear you ask?
"Th[e] re-translation [of man into nature] is altogether a task for the future: 'there never was yet a natural humanity' ([Nietzsche,] Will to Power nr. 120). Man must be 'made natural' (vernatürlicht) together 'with the pure, newly found, newly redeemed nature' ([Nietzsche,] The Gay Science aph. 109). For a man is the not yet fixed, not yet established beast (aph. 62): man becomes natural by acquiring his final, fixed character. For the nature of a being is its end, its completed state, its peak (Aristotle, Politics 1252b 32-34 ). 'I too speak of "return to nature," although it is properly not a going back but an ascent—up into the high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness..." ([Nietzsche,] Twilight of the Idols, 'Skirmishes of an untimely man' nr. 48). Man reaches his peak through and in the philosopher of the future as the truly complementary man in whom not only man but the rest of existence is justified ([Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil] aph. 207)." (Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, page 189 = "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil", paragraph 33.)
Nietzche's philosopher of the future is the nature of man, the natural man, in the sense that he is at the same time 1) man's peak and 2) natural in the sense of "the pure, newly found, newly redeemed nature", which is basically nature according to modern natural science (cf. Beyond Good and Evil aph. 22). He is man's completed state:
"I teach: that there are higher and lower men, and that a single individual can under certain circumstances justify the existence of whole millennia—that is, a full, rich, great, whole human being in relation to countless incomplete fragmentary men." (Will to Power nr. 997 whole, Kaufmann trans.)
And he is natural—highly, freely, even terribly natural:
"NB. The highest man [is] to be conceived of as an image of nature: monstrous abundance, monstrous reason in particulars, as a whole squandering himself, indifferent thereto:——" (Nietzsche, workbook Spring 1884 25 [140] whole, my trans.; cf. Beyond Good and Evil aph. 9.)
Now at the same time as all this, the Vernatürlichung of man is the peak of the anthropomorphization of the non-human. How is that?
"[P]robity is an end rather than a beginning; it points to the past rather than to the future; it must be supported, modified, fortified by 'our most delicate, most disguised, most spiritual will to power' which is directed toward the future." (Paragraph 31 end = page 188; quoting Beyond Good and Evil aph. 227.)
Probity, or the unconditional will to truth, is the "core" of the ascetic ideal (cf. Strauss's next sentence with On the Genealogy of Morals—Nietzsche's express sequel to Beyond Good and Evil—, Third Treatise, section 27 and the preceding sections). It views everything as Being, as opposed to Becoming: the past has already happened, it is fixed, and so is the future viewed mechanistically. In other words, probity views even the future as past.
"Death has smothered every spark of life in the castle of death. Nothing moves; even time is scarcely noticeable. Everything is shrouded in the odor of dusty eternity. This dead world is not a Schopenhauerian world, a cauldron of living and suffering, in which countless passions strive for satisfaction against one another. It is the world of the cosmic will and its perpetual struggle and suffering. But there is neither struggle nor suffering in the world of Zarathustra's castle of death, because it contains no living beings. It is devoid of all motions until the explosion of scornful laughter. This dead world is the polar opposite of the Schopenhauerian world. The castle of death, I propose, is the outcome of scientific reduction. It is the world of dead matter. [...] Scientific reduction is to reduce the phenomena (for example, consciousness) of a higher level to those (for example, the brain state) of a lower level. Throughout his teaching career, he [Zarathustra] has advocated naturalism or physicalism. In 'On the Despisers of the Body' of Part I, he identified mind and body. But the identification of mind and body is not the same as the reduction of mind to body. On Feuerbach's identity theory, the body is as spiritual as it is physical. Nature is spirit materialized or matter spiritualized. Since every physical object is basically spiritual, it is alive, too. On the other hand, reductionism reduces all living things to dead matter. The living things are only the epiphenomena of dead matter. Life is only an illusion and a surface phenomenon. Scientific reduction kills not only God, but all living things. The whole world becomes the dungeon of death, which encounters Zarathustra in his nightmare. [...] To his surprise, the castle of death pours out a torrential outburst of laughter, which expresses the irrepressible force of life. [...T]he presumed dungeon of death explodes with the force of life. This explosion has been prepared by Zarathustra's descent to the underworld in the preceding section. In his geological account of the heart of the earth, we noted, he has changed Empedocles' fire to his gold. We also noted that both fire and gold are emblems of the living force. Zarathustra also said that the golden fire hound takes not only gold but also laughter from the heart of the earth. The exploding laughter in the dungeon of death is the laughter from the heart of the earth. It is the explosion of life in what appears to be the dungeon of dead matter. The dungeon of death is a metaphor for the mechanistic view of the world. In BGE 36, Nietzsche says that the mechanistic view is the view from outside and that the worldview from inside is the will to power and nothing else. In the dungeon of death, Zarathustra is being initiated from the outside into the inside of the universe. The mechanism is the outside view that conceals the inside view. This distinction between the inside and the outside view is indicated by the peal of laughter that explodes from a thousand masks of children. A mask usually covers a face. It stands for an external view that conceals an internal state. Such concealment produces an illusion.
Zarathustra's nightmare was an illusion. He encounters the castle of death in the kingdom of night. This is quite a change from 'The Night Song' and 'The Dancing Song'. In these two songs, night was the kingdom of life. In his nightmare, however, night has become the kingdom of death. But the night of death abruptly changes into the night of life at the critical moment of his nightmare. What has initially appeared to be the castle of death turns out to be Zarathustra's momentary pessimistic delusion induced by reductive materialism. The delusive character of his pessimism is further indicated by the fact that his dream is only a dream. Although the material world appears to be dead, it is charged with the irrepressible and inexhaustible forces of life. This point has already been made by Life in her secret intrusion to Zarathustra in 'On Self-Overcoming'. We noted that Life's description of itself as the perpetual will to power was a poetic image of Spinoza's conception of Nature. According to the materialistic conception of Nature, matter has no power of its own. The material objects can move only when they are pushed by external forces. Hence they are not only powerless, but also lifeless because life requires power. This is why reductive materialism inevitably leads to the conception of a totally dead world. But Spinoza's Nature is neither powerless nor lifeless because power is its essence. The explosion of laughter reaffirms Zarathustra's faith in the will to power as the ultimate force of Nature and enables him to overcome the momentary pessimistic crisis in the castle of death." (T.K. Seung, Nietzsche's Epic of the Soul, pp. 90-93, on Thus Spake Zarathustra, "The Soothsayer".)
In order to surmount mere probity, in order to "support, modify, fortify" it—to raise it sky-high like a Dionysian floodwave—, one must make a "postulation" (Strauss, paragraph 35 = page 190): this "delicate", "spiritual" act, in which the whole past is willed to recur in the future as present, as life, as will to power—for this, I've adapted the formula from Zarathustra's Prologue, "Let your will say: the Superman shall be the meaning of the earth", to: "Let your will say: the world shall be the will to power, and nothing besides!" (cf. Beyond Good and Evil aph. 36 and Will to Power nr. 1067.)
2. Nietzsche's philosophy as objective subjectivism.
Nietzsche's workbook entry Autumn 1887 9 [106] reads, in its entirety:
"Our psychological perspective is determined by the following:
1) that communication[ is necessary, and that for there to be communication something has to be firm, simplified, capable of precision (above all in the identical case…) For it to be communicable, however, it must be experienced as adapted, as 'recognizable'. The material of the senses adapted by the understanding, reduced to rough outlines, made similar, subsumed under related matters. Thus the fuzziness and chaos of sense impressions are, as it were, logicized.
2) the world of 'phenomena' is the adapted world which we feel to be real. The 'reality' lies in the continual recurrence of identical, familiar, related things in their logicized character, in the belief that here we are able to reckon and calculate.
3) the antithesis of this phenomenal world is not 'the true world,' but the formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensations—another kind of phenomenal world, a kind 'unknowable' for us.
4) questions, what things 'in-themselves' may be like, apart from our sense receptivity and the activity of our understanding, must be rebutted with the question: how could we know that things exist? 'Thingness' was first created by us. The question is whether there could not be many other way[s] of creating such an apparent world—and whether this creating, logicizing, adapting, falsifying is not itself the best-guaranteed reality; in short, whether that which 'posits things' is not the sole reality; and whether the 'effect of the external world upon us' is not also only the result of such active subjects…
'cause and effect' false interpretation of a war and a relative victory
the other 'entities' act upon us; our adapted apparent world is an adaptation and overpowering of their actions; a kind of defensive measure.
The subject alone is demonstrable: hypothesis that only subjects exist—that 'object' is only a kind of effect produced by a subject upon a subject… a modus of the subject" (Trans. mostly Kauffman's, of Will to Power nr. 569.)
The first thing we should note is the phrase "our sense receptivity and the activity of our understanding". For this employs almost exactly the same terms (Rezeptivität and Aktivität, actually) George Grant used in the passage I quoted in my "What Is Nietzsche's Sovereign Agent?" For Nietzsche, as opposed to the ancients, then, it's not thought but sensation which is a receptivity. Thought is not a passion but an action—though let us note that Grant says "at its height" a passion, and "finally" a receptivity. How can thought, for Nietzsche, become a passion, a receptivity? It seems the understanding would somehow have to be inhibited (by itself) from adapting the material of the senses. Yet this is not what Nietzsche suggests; he suggests, he hypothesizes, that only subjects exist: "active" subjects, to be precise. Now as I indicated in the said little essay, the word Kaufmann translates as "active" is wollend. This literally means "willing", but in English that means pretty much the opposite of "active"—hence Kaufmann's translation, and my phrasing "actively willing subjects". Now as Grant says, the making of hypotheses is intimately connected with the acts of our wills. So we could say that Nietzsche wills the formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensations to consist solely of actively willing subjects. Compare also the very end of "Strauss's climactic paragraph" (as Lampert called paragraph 35): "a postulation, […] an act of the will to power on the part of the highest nature." In other words, a hypothesis, an act of Nietzsche's will. This, then, is what I mean by "Nietzsche's objective subjectivism". It may be useful to compare Charles Sanders Peirce's central teaching:
"Peirce's objective idealism is the paradoxical doctrine that what is most intimate and private, not observable but only introspectable [namely, feeling], in fact exists objectively: it composes the universe and all the things in it that we objectively observe. The 'law of mind' must be known by introspection but applies objectively, so that, by looking within our own minds, we grasp the fundamental law of the universe." (T.L. Short, "What was Peirce's Objective Idealism?")
This is basically what Nietzsche did, except that it's not feeling but will—to power—which Nietzsche applies "objectively". Then again, is not the will itself a feeling—a pathos, in fact (Will to Power nr. 635; cf. Zarathustra "In the Happy Isles" and "Of Redemption")?
3. Heidegger's God as a distinct, unique death.
a. Nietzsche's Superman as the universal end.
I contend that man only becomes natural when all of nature becomes human for him, in his hypothesis, his postulation,—his willing to power. Of course, I don't mean literally or fully human. Still, it may be helpful to pretend it means just that for a bit. Let's compare my contention with Buddhism. In Buddhism, to be fully human, fully vernatürlicht as a human, means to fully realize one's Buddha-nature—in other words, to be fully enlightened. But this Buddha-nature is something the human being has in common with all beings: it is not just the deepest, but also the highest reality of all beings. But here's the thing: one can only be fully enlightened when all other beings are also fully enlightened. This is called anuttara samyak sambodhi, and I've translated this literally as "unsurpassed correct coillumination". The prefix "com-" in "correct" and (my coinage) "coillumination", like the "sam-" in "samyak" and "sambodhi", is an intensive prefix, but it's quite apt that it literally means "together" (for both prefixes). A bodhisattva is more enlightened than an arhat because he realizes he cannot be fully enlightened unless he is so together with all other beings.
I give this information about Buddhism because it may help us understand one or two things Strauss says:
"[T]here arises the philosophic task of understanding the universal structure common to all historical worlds. Yet if the insight into the historicity of all thought is to be preserved, the understanding of the universal or essential structure of all historical worlds must be accompanied and in a way guided by that insight. This means that the understanding of the essential structure of all historical worlds must be understood as essentially belonging to a specific historical context, to a specific historical period. The character of the historicist insight must correspond to the character of the period to which it belongs. The historicist insight is the final insight in the sense that it reveals all earlier thought as radically defective in the decisive respect and that there is no possibility of another legitimate change in the future which would render obsolete or as it were mediatise this insight. As the absolute insight it must belong to the absolute moment in history. In a word, the difficulty indicated compels Heidegger to elaborate, sketch or suggest what in the case of any other man would be called his philosophy of history.
The absolute moment may be the absolute moment simply or the absolute moment of all previous history." (Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, pp. 31-32.)
And:
"[O]ne cannot behold, i.e. truly understand, any culture unless one is firmly rooted in one's own culture or unless one belongs in one's capacity as a beholder to some culture. But if the universality of the beholding of all cultures is to be preserved, the culture to which the beholder of all cultures belongs must be the universal culture, the culture of mankind, the world culture; the universality of beholding presupposes, if only by anticipating it, the universal culture which is no longer one culture among many. The variety of cultures that have hitherto emerged contradicts the oneness of truth. Truth is not a woman so that each man can have his own truth as he can have his own wife. Nietzsche sought therefore for a culture that would no longer be particular and hence in the last analysis arbitrary. The single goal of mankind is conceived by him as in a sense super-human: he speaks of the super-man of the future." (op.cit., pp. 148-49.)
Now let's look more closely at these two phrases: "of all previous history" and "if only by anticipating it". I think the latter clarifies the former. For if the absolute moment were only the absolute moment of all previous history, the possibility of another legitimate change in the future would remain. The absolute moment of all previous history may be rendered obsolete or as it were mediatized, but only by an absolute moment of all previous history that anticipates the absolute moment simply more completely. The absolute moment of all previous history can only be absolute insofar as it anticipates the absolute moment simply. Now let us compare Buddhism. Anuttara samyak sambodhi would of course be the absolute moment simply. But bodhisattvas are already "enlightenment-beings" (literally) because they anticipate that absolute moment. The moment in history in which the bodhisattva lives is therefore the absolute moment of all his previous "personal" history (i.e., the whole sequence of his many lives, previous and present).—Well then, Strauss speaks of "the universal culture, the culture of mankind, the world culture"; and, with Nietzsche, of the super-man of the future. But can the universal culture really be only the culture of mankind, i.e. of all human beings? Wouldn't it have to be the culture of all sentient or intelligent (sensing or understanding!) beings simply? So that "world" needn't just mean "earth" at all? Further on in the first essay of the op.cit., he says:
"Heidegger's philosophy of history has the same structure as Marx' and Nietzsche's: the moment in which the final insight is arriving opens the eschatological project. But Heidegger is much closer to Nietzsche than to Marx. Both thinkers regard as decisive the nihilism which according to them began in Plato (or before)—Christianity being only Platonism for the people—and whose ultimate consequence is the present decay. Hitherto every great age of humanity grew out of Bodenständigkeit (rootedness in the soil). Yet the great age of classical Greece gave birth to a way of thinking which in principle endangered Bodenständigkeit from the beginning and in its ultimate contemporary consequences is about to destroy the last relics of that condition of human greatness. Heidegger's philosophy belongs to the infinitely dangerous moment when man is in a greater danger than ever before of losing his humanity and therefore—danger and salvation belonging together—philosophy can have the task of contributing toward the recovery or return of Bodenständigkeit or rather of preparing an entirely novel kind of Bodenständigkeit: a Bodenständigkeit beyond the most extreme Bodenlosigkeit ["soillessness"], a being at home beyond the most extreme homelessness. Nay, there are reasons for thinking that according to Heidegger the world has never yet been in order, or thought has never yet been simply human. A dialogue between the most profound thinkers of the Occident and the most profound thinkers of the Orient and in particular East Asia may lead to the consummation prepared, accompanied or followed by a return of the gods." (Page 33.)
Novalis had already said: "Philosophy is really homesickness: urge to be at home everywhere." (Notes for a General Encyclopedia, nr. 857.) Heidegger's philosophic task, then, is to prepare a being at home in the whole universe. And if thought has never yet been simply human, the universal culture may still be the culture of all humankind: when, as I said, all of nature becomes human for man—in his postulation that all beings have the true Human-nature (Buddha-nature = "Sapiens-nature"!) in common with him.
b. Nietzsche's Ariadne as the target of the "Buddha of Europe".
In Ecce Homo, "Why I Write Such Good Books", 'Thus Spake Zarathustra', section 7, Nietzsche calls Zarathustra "a Dionysos" and illustrates this by quoting "The Night-Song" in its entirety. There, Zarathustra indeed sings or laments himself as a Dionysos, which is to say as total will to power, i.e. abundance; no erōs, i.e. no need(iness), whatsoever. Nietzsche says that Zarathustra is "condemned by the overfullness of light and power, by his solar nature, not to love." And in the next section, nr. 8, he says "[t]he answer to such a dithyramb of solar isolation [Vereinsamung] in the light would be Ariadne..." Now in "The Night-Song", Zarathustra says:
"Many suns circle in desert space: to all that is dark do they speak with their light—but to me they are silent.
Oh, this is the hostility of light to the shining one: unpityingly doth it pursue its course.
Unfair to the shining one in its innermost heart, cold to the suns:—thus travelleth every sun." (Common trans.)
And elsewhere, Nietzsche writes:
"On [or: Toward] the re-emergence of the world.
From two negations emerges a position [Position] if the negations are forces. (There emerges darkness from light against light, cold from heat against heat, etc.)" (Workbook July-August 1882 1 [51] whole, my trans.)
Silence is to hearing as darkness is to sight. In other words, because Zarathustra is himself a sun, the other suns are dark to him. So the answer that is Ariadne must somehow involve another sun—or even one of the "twinkling starlets and glow-worms aloft" (ibid.)—growing brighter than Zarathustra himself; or, for that matter, multiple "twinkling starlets and glow-worms" together[... And indeed, Nietzsche continues section 8, after a dash, with the following self-quote:
"I walk amongst men as the fragments of the future: that future which I contemplate.
And it is all my poetisation and aspiration to compose and collect into unity what is fragment and riddle and fearful chance." ("Of Redemption", Common trans.)
And in the prequel thereto, Zarathustra says:
"Verily, my friends, I walk amongst men as amongst the fragments and limbs of human beings!
This is the terrible thing to mine eye, that I find man broken up, and scattered about, as on a battle- and butcher-ground.
And when mine eye fleeth from the present to the bygone, it findeth ever the same: fragments and limbs and fearful chances—but no men!" (ibid.)
Ariadne, then, is the man whom this Dionysos seeks to make "stronger, more evil and more profound; also more beautiful" (BGE 295).—And if anything, the means by which he seeks to do so is the teaching of the eternal recurrence. Thus Nietzsche continues the same section by self-quoting from yet another speech of Zarathustra's:
"[T]o man doth it ever impel me anew, my fervent creative will; thus impelleth it the hammer to the stone.
Ah, ye men, within the stone slumbereth an image for me, the image of my visions! Ah, that it should slumber in the hardest, ugliest stone!
Now rageth my hammer ruthlessly against its prison. From the stone fly the fragments: what's that to me!
I will complete it, for a shadow came unto me,—the stillest and lightest of all things once came unto me!
The beauty of the superman came unto me as a shadow". ("In the Happy Isles", Common trans., with Nietzsche's added emphasis and slightly altered punctuation.)
And elsewhere, he writes:
"A pessimistic teaching and way of thinking, an ecstatic nihilism, can under certain conditions be indispensable precisely to the philosopher—as a mighty pressure and hammer with which he breaks and removes degenerate and decaying races to make way for a new order of life, or to implant into that which is degenerate and deserves to die a longing for the end." (Will to Power nr. 1055 whole, Kaufmann trans.; cf. (e.g.) 55, 247, 462, 862, 1053-54 and 1056-60.)
—So Ariadne, in one of her aspects at least, is the man who is even greater than this Dionysos. May we perhaps say that she is the culture, i.e. the collective of beings, which doesn't contradict the oneness of the woman Truth?—Be that as it may, three and a half years ago I wrote the following about Nietzsche's note "On the re-emergence of the world":
"The heat death of the universe means that the universe approaches (but only as an asymptote, a limit that can never be reached but only approximated) absolute darkness and cold. I was thinking absolute darkness and cold could again give birth to light and heat if confronted with another darkness and cold. What's certain is that, to absolute darkness and cold, another absolute darkness and cold would not be dark and cold—and therefore, relatively bright and warm, if formerly the former was not absolute... This means the absolute darkness and cold which our universe 'approaches' becomes ever less dark and cold to it. Logically, it's the same limit as that 'before' the Big Bang... The only thing missing for the ER according to current scientific consensus, then, is that the limit is actually reached."
If the limit is the absolute moment simply, and the absolute moment could be reached, wouldn't the "final decline" Strauss mentions on page 32 of Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy be the "decline" from the moment "before" the Big Bang—i.e., the Big Bang, the emergence of the universe, itself? Thus Lukacher speaks, though not of a "decline", of a "contamination":
"It would appear that the World Soul returns eternally only by virtue of the fact that, in each cycle, the One gives Its gift absolutely, without hope of return. Every time the cycle of becoming reaches its endpoint, there is another gift, or more precisely, the return of the same gift. And each time it is only because the gift is pure and absolute that there can be the eternal contamination that is the coming to presence of a cosmos. This pure gift takes the form of a circle, but does so only inadvertently; only by giving a gift outside the circle of exchange is the circle achieved." (Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence, page 27. The Abrahamic (exoteric Platonic/Aristotelian) world view is a time-fetish in the sense of a prosthesis, a substitute "penis": the soothing view of something surveyable, with a definite beginning and end. The idea of eternal recurrence, on the other hand, is a more subtle time-fetish, in that it at least images time as a ring or circle—a hole.)
The return of the many (gods) from the One!
4. Zarathustra's heaven as the mind of clear light.
"[Strauss:] Now let us read another passage in Zarathustra before we go on, on page 277, the end of the fifth paragraph, the passage which we have read but which we will reread now.
[Reader:] 'But this is my blessing: to stand over every single thing as its own heaven, as its round roof, its azure bell, and eternal security: and blessed is he who blesses thus[!]'
[Strauss:] Let us stop here. To let anything be what it is, not to be distorted, not to do violence to it—that is true perception. Every construction of the thing, every reduction of the thing by virtue of scientific method does not permit the thing to be what it is. Generally, knowledge is something like this: to let everything be what it is in its fullness. But why must this be creative? Why is this not simply taking, perceiving the thing, being open to what the thing is? Why must it be creative? Why must Zarathustra bless these things so that they are protected by him as if he were the heaven above him? What does it mean? Zarathustra is needed, we can say, because the heaven is not sufficient for the purpose. Why? The heaven itself is subject to interpretation. You can also say [that] heaven has been dissolved or is dissolved by modern scientific analysis. Man, or a certain kind of man—that is to say, the highest form of the will to power—must do what heaven does not manifestly do. He must consecrate everything, every being, so that it can be what it is. But this is not sufficient for giving the eternal security of which Nietzsche speaks. Only by virtue of eternal return, a human postulate, primarily(,) can it fully be, for every being is conditioned. It has causes: its ultimate causes are outside of the realm of human experience. There is science applied and therefore we have here—side by side [with] science, which goes beyond the realm of human experience in order to discover the causes of things—an art which remains strictly within the realm of human experience. Science or metaphysics goes beyond what is within the realm of human experience. It conjectures the ultimate causes. But this conjecture and positing of first causes is inevitable unless the will to power is converted from positing the transtemporal or the transhuman to willing eternal return. Only by being willed eternally can the thing fully be.—One can state it paradoxically (we will come across a passage where Nietzsche says so later): that the thing itself cannot fully be if it is not, in a way, its own cause, so that by seeking for its causes, you do not have to go beyond the thing. You do not have to dissolve the thing in its causes, and this would be possible if the thing is its own cause by virtue of eternal return.
The other way [to state it]: philosophy as the most [spiritual will] to power is the will to the causa prima (that is, the first cause), as Nietzsche put it in the [ninth aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil]. That means [that] philosophy is the origin of meaning and value, is the fundamental will of man—either of the individual thinker or, in former ages, of the people. This will is the origin and precondition [in] that we cannot go back behind it unless we have an absolute system of mediation, which is beyond the interpretation. Otherwise there is always a relativity that each system of interpretation is as defensible as every other system, so [that] this will becomes the origin and precondition. Yet it is impossible to deny that this will, meaning-giving will, is at the same time conditioned. For instance, not the ego creates, but the self, and the self is a product of heritage, tradition, so that the alleged first cause is conditioned by its cause. And secondly, as will, it is directed towards the future but on the basis of the past which transforms. The past is given, imposed, not willed. If the will of an individual human being, say, of Nietzsche, is to be the origin of meaning and value, and that will manifestly has a cause, the only way out in order to save this position is to say that this will is the cause of itself: eternal return.
We should read some passages in the last statement occurring in Zarathustra on eternal return. That is the speech 'The Convalescent,' on page 327 following. We make an [Lacuna in the transcript.] first, and then we'll turn to the questions, because I do not know whether I have made sufficiently clear what I have been trying to do for quite a few lectures: the necessity which drove Nietzsche into this, in his day absolutely paradoxical, not to say absurd, doctrine of eternal return." (Strauss, lecture on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, May 18, 1959.)
And there we have it. The doctrine of eternal return remained an absurdity for Strauss. In paragraph 15 of his "Note on the Plan", he admits that he has "no access to" "an important ingredient, not to say the nerve, of Nietzsche's 'theology'"; and he connects this with "Ariadne's Lament", one of Nietzsche's Dionysos Dithyrambs. Now Lampert writes on this:
"Strauss did have access to the divinity of Dionysos and Plato.
But if he had access to those philosophizing gods, what he had 'no access' to would have to be divine Ariadne." (Lampert, The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss, page 295.)
Could this mean Strauss had no access to Zarathustra's heaven?—On Wikipedia, we read:
"In Tibetan Buddhism, emptiness is often symbolized by and compared to the open sky which is associated with openness and freedom."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Śūnyatā#/ ... ladesh.JPG
Emptiness (shunyata) is also identified with the mind of clear light and with Buddha-nature. In the oldest, the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, the latter two concepts are identified as follows:
"The clear light or the dark light is in fact the appearance of one's true nature, of one's true Buddha-nature, appearing just so—just as it is. It is the true face of the primordial Buddha". (Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo, "P'howa, Part 4: The Appearance of the Peaceful Deities".)
Yet the founder, Tsongkhapa, of the youngest, the Gelug tradition, likewise denies that emptiness is unconditioned:
"According to both Tsongkhapa and Nagarjuna, emptiness is [itself] also empty of inherent existence: emptiness only exists nominally and conventionally. Emptiness is co-dependently arisen as a quality of conventional phenomena and is itself a conventional phenomenon. There is no emptiness just 'floating around out there' or a 'Great Emptiness from which everything else arises.' For example, a table is empty of inherently being a table from its own side. This is referred to as 'the emptiness of the table.' The emptiness of the table exists conventionally as a property of that particular table."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prasaṅgik ... _Emptiness
In my experience, willing the eternal recurrence opens (one to) the mind of clear light.
"In Vajrayāna Buddhism the subtlest state of consciousness is known as clear light. In terms of categories of consciousness, there is one type of consciousness that consists of a permanent stream or an unending continuity and there are other forms of consciousness whose continuum comes to an end. Both these levels of consciousness—one consisting of an endless continuum and the other of a finite continuum—have a momentary nature. That is to say, they arise from moment to moment, and they are constantly in a state of flux. So the permanence of the first kind is only in terms of its continuum. The subtlest consciousness consists of such an eternal continuum, while the streams of the grosser states of consciousness do end."
https://religion.fandom.com/wiki/Mindst ... te_note-21
"The average temperature of the universe is determined by the afterglow left over from the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background radiation. It evenly pervades space at an effective temperature of 2.73° above absolute zero. This is utterly frigid, hundreds of degrees colder than any temperature terrestrial organisms can survive. But the fact that the temperature is non-zero implies a corresponding tiny amount of heat in deep space. This of course implies a corresponding tiny amount of experience."
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/is-c ... everywhere
