The Masculine and the Feminine & The Beautiful and the Ugly.
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The Masculine and the Feminine & The Beautiful and the Ugly.
Sauwelios Mon Apr 13, 2015 3:24 am
Introduction.
Central to Nietzsche's philosophy is the feminine, or rather the difference between the masculine and the feminine ("feminine" is a relative term!). Thus he opens his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), as follows.
"Much will have been gained for aesthetics once we have succeeded in apprehending directly-- rather than merely ascertaining--that art owes its continuous evolution to the Apollinian-Dionysian duality, even as the propagation of the species depends on the duality of the sexes, their constant conflicts and periodic acts of reconciliation."
This is the first sentence of the first section of his first book. But it does not end here. In the first sentence of the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil (1886), he compares truth--a central concept for a philosopher, I should say!--to a woman; and in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-85), his mystical poetic work, he regards Life, Eternity, Happiness, and Wisdom as women.
All this may serve to confirm to what extent his healthy heterosexual attunement toward the feminine permeated his thought. And indeed, he himself writes, in the aforementioned Beyond Good and Evil:
"The degree and kind of a man's sexuality reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit." (section 75 whole.)
Be it then proclaimed that Nietzsche's masculinity, and thereby his attunement toward the feminine, and thus the difference between the masculine and the feminine, are of the essence of his philosophy. It is from this basic difference that the dualities found throughout his work derive: the Apollinian and the Dionysian (later the Dionysian and the Christian), the Classical and the Modern, the strong and the weak, the Masters and the Slaves, etc. It is therefore a very fruitful enterprise to study his ideas about man and woman; it may even unlock Nietzsche's philosophy for us.
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Part I: The Masculine and the Feminine.
1. The will to please and the will to be terrible.
First I will assert that the Classical and the Modern correspond to the masculine and the feminine for Nietzsche. We may later see why this is so; but right now, I will suppose a sufficient familiarity with Nietzsche's writings in my readers so as to be able to appreciate this correspondence even if one hadn't realised it yet.
I will contrast the masculine and the feminine by the hand of two passages, both from The Will to Power. The first is about woman; the second about the Classical.
"Would any link at all be missing in the chain of art and science if woman, if the work of woman were missing? Admitting exceptions--they prove the rule--woman attains perfection in everything that is not a work: in letters, in memoirs, even in the most delicate handiwork, in short in everything that is not a métier—precisely because in these things she perfects herself, because she here obeys the only artistic impulse she has--she wants to please..." (section 817 (1887-88).)
"Classical taste: that is the will to simplification, strengthening, to visibility of happiness, to terribleness, the courage of psychological nakedness (--simplification is a consequence of the will to strengthening; allowing happiness to become visible, as well as nakedness, a consequence of the will to terribleness...).” (section 868 (1887-88).)
Both translations are versions of the Walter Kaufmann translation, corrected by yours truly in accordance with the German original. Kaufmann translates "the will to terribleness" as "the will to be terrible", which is indeed what is meant ("terrible" in the sense of "fearful, terrifying"). This translation makes it easier to see the contrast between
the will to be terrible
the will to please.
Now in the second passage, Nietzsche first mentions five different things (the will to simplification, to strengthening, to visibility of happiness, to terribleness, and the courage of psychological nakedness), and then orders these in two groups, or rather: he uses two of them to categorise the other three, into consequences of the one and consequences of the other. Thus he basically mentions only two different things: the will to strengthening and the will to be terrible.
If we contrast the will to be terrible with the will to please, the corresponding contrast is between the will to strengthening and the will to weakening. Why should anyone want to become weaker? Because one thereby becomes more pleasing. Thus the will to weakening is a means of the will to please, and therefore the will to strengthening is a means of the will to be terrible. And the will to please is a form of the will to power: by being pleasing to him, woman wills power over man. Therefore the will to be terrible is the corresponding masculine form of the will to power.
One could counter that the will to please is only woman's only artistic impulse, and not the essence of her being. But as Heidegger says--and this is firmly grounded in Nietzsche--, "will to power finds its supreme configuration [Gestalt] in art" (Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. I, chapter 12, trans. Farrell Krell). And as "this world is the will to power--and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power--and nothing besides!" (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1067), the will to please is the supreme configuration of woman's very being.
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2. Negative and positive beauty.
"Custom and beauty.--In favour of custom let it not be kept quiet that in whomever subjects himself to it completely and wholeheartedly and from the very beginning, the organs of attack and defense--the corporeal as well as the spiritual ones--atrophy: that is to say, he becomes increasingly more beautiful! For it is the exercise of those organs and of the attitude that corresponds to them that keeps ugly and makes uglier. For this reason the old baboon is uglier than the young, and the female young baboon is most akin to man: thus the most beautiful.--From this one should draw a conclusion regarding the origin of the beauty of women!" (Nietzsche, Dawn of Day, section 25 whole, my translation.)
This explains how one's weakening can increase one's power to please. For the atrophy of one's corporeal and spiritual organs of attack and defense--which follows from the lack of the exercise of those organs and the corresponding attitude--apparently makes people as well as baboons aesthetically more pleasing to people. But one will see that this is a wholly negative beauty.
Nietzsche says the exercise of those organs and of the attitude that corresponds to them keeps ugly and makes uglier. But "ugly" is hässlich in German, literally "hately"--hateful in the sense of
"arousing hatred". This hatred is aroused not because the "hately" one is lacking something, but to the contrary, because he has something in excess. He is too formidable for us, too terrible to be a pleasant sight to us.
The "ugly one", as opposed to the beautiful one whose beauty is wholly negative, is too formidable for us, too terrible to be a pleasant sight to us.
"It is a question of strength [Kraft] (of an individual or of a people), whether and where the judgment "beautiful" is applied. The feeling of plenitude, of dammed-up strength (which permits one to meet with courage and good-humor much that makes the weakling shudder)--the feeling of power applies the judgment "beautiful" even to things and conditions that the instinct of impotence could only find hateful and "ugly" [hassenswert, "hässlich"]. The nose for what we could still barely deal with if it confronted us in the flesh--as danger, problem, temptation--this determines even our aesthetic Yes. ("That is beautiful" is an affirmation.)" (The Will to Power, section 852.)
But this passage presents us with a problem. For is the beautiful only that which we're up to? That is, which we're sufficiently strong to subdue? Must the beautiful always be something we see, or can imagine, beneath us? From a man's perspective it may seem so; but what about a woman's perspective? If a man finds a woman beautiful in the negative sense, as someone he sees beneath himself in strength, she cannot see him in the same way, of course (supposing they see things as they are, i.e., they are not mistaken about each other's strength). And yet they may be attracted to each other--that is, she may also be attracted to him. So there is also a positive beauty, though it's not aesthetically "pleasing". It is rather that beauty which, as Moody Lawless once said, "is terror": as "every thing of power is a sight to behold". The latter quotation may not be exact.
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3. Eros and phobos.
In Miguel Serrano's NOS, a conversation between him and Jung is recorded. In the course of that, Jung says:
"Eros was united with his Beloved inside the Great Orphic, Cosmic Egg: Phanes, Erika Paios. Eros unites, but Phobos, fear, hatred (nothing is closer to love than hatred) disunites, leads to separation, breaks the Cosmic Egg. So as to acquire consciousness, individuality, so as to be able one day to give a face to the Cosmic Egg." (from the chapter “Another Turn of the Wheel”.)
According to Jung, the Greek phobos (as in "hydrophobic", water-repellent) may mean both "fear" and "hatred"; and it stands opposed to eros. The thing is that eros seeks to diminish the gulf between two beings, whereas phobos seeks to widen it. That gulf arouses the pathos of distance.
"Erôs arises in response to the gulf that separates the exemplary human being from all others, and it naturally aspires to bridge this gulf. While the self-overflowing emanations of the will establish and preserve the pathos of distance, erôs strives to eliminate or minimize the distance between lover and beloved." (Daniel W. Conway, “Love's labor's lost”.)
Thus an "ugly" being, as measured by the negative concept of beauty--feminine beauty--, may arouse the eros of beings that are "beautiful" in this sense. It is precisely the former's phobos, its fearsomeness,--that which sets it apart, and wills to do so--which arouses the latter's eros: by creating a gulf, a barrier, a desert around the former:
"The greatness of an artist cannot be measured by the 'beautiful feelings' he arouses: leave that idea to females. But according to the degree to which he approaches the grand style, to which he is capable of the grand style. This style has this in common with great passion, that it disdains to please[!]; that it forgets to persuade; that it commands; that it wills-- To become master of the chaos one is; to compel one's chaos to become form; to become logical, simple, unambiguous, mathematics, law--that is the grand ambition here.-- It repels[!]; such men of force are no longer loved--a desert [Einöde, "solitude"] spreads around them, a silence, a fear as in the presence of some great sacrilege--" (The Will to Power, section 842.)
When Nietzsche says "such men of force are no longer loved" (nichts reizt mehr die Liebe zu solchen Gewaltmenschen, "nothing arouses the love toward such force-men anymore"), he means they are no longer amiable to anyone anymore; they do arouse "love" in the sense of erôs...
"Other forms of love, such as agape, the universal, spiritual love praised in the Gospel of John, may certainly play an important role within specific cultural settings, but they cannot serve to found or constitute culture. The founding of culture requires as its catalyst nothing less than erôs, the most powerful, discriminating, egoistic and dangerous form of love known to humankind". (Conway, ibid.)
And to return to the relationship between great passion and the grand style: Nietzsche elsewhere writes:
"A period when the old masquerade and moral decking-up of the affects arouses antipathy: naked nature[!]; where the decisiveness of quanta of power is simply admitted (as determining rank); where the grand style appears again as the consequence of grand passion." (The Will to Power, section 1024 whole.)
Here we see Nietzsche's view is indeed (compare the "problem" mentioned in the preceding section) wholly quantitative. And indeed, Nietzsche elsewhere distinguishes between man and woman precisely on the basis of the quantity of their passion:
"The female intellect.--Women's intellect is manifested as perfect control [not unsettled by passion], presence of mind [unclouded by passion], and utilization of all advantages [because less passion means less advantages]. [... W]omen have the intelligence, men the heart and passion. This is not contradicted by the fact that men actually get so much farther with their intelligence: they have the deeper, more powerful drives; these take their intelligence, which is in itself something passive, forward." (Human, All Too Human, aphorism 411.)
Spiritually, man and woman are gradations which behave as opposites. The difference between them follows from a difference in passion: man has much, woman has little. And the great style follows from great passion. Therefore woman is incapable of the grand style.
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4. Aidos and aiskhyne.
This thread was actually inspired by thoughts on shame and shyness. I haven't mentioned these things at all in my thread so far, if I'm not mistaken.
Shame is directly related to beauty in the negative sense (feminine beauty):
"Shamefacedness.--Women's shamefacedness generally increases with their beauty." (HATH 398 whole.)
Much occasion for remarks here. First off, the word here translated as "shamefacedness", Schamhaftigkeit, is rendered on The Nietzsche Channel as "modesty". Also, the word here translated as "women" is Frauen, which means "gentlewomen" as opposed to women in general, Weiber, common women. Of course, it is only "gentlewomen" that are beautiful: beauty is no accident.
LEO renders "Schamhaftigkeit" solely as "shamefacedness. And Merriam-Webster defines "shamefaced" as:
"1 : showing modesty : BASHFUL
2 : showing shame : ASHAMED"
The difference between these two things may be illustrated by what the third of my three most-frequented dictionary sites, the OED, says about shame:
"Gk. distinguished shame in the bad sense of 'disgrace, dishonor' (aiskhyne) from shame in the good sense of 'modesty, bashfulness' (aidos)."
Also, let us immediately notice that "shamefaced" has nothing to do with the word "face", but is a corruption of "shamefast" (see the OED).
Now let us look closer to the Greek words mentioned above. Aidos originally meant "shyness", in the original sense of a "shying away from, avoiding". It essentially has to do with a sense of fear (German Furcht) or respect (German Ehrfurcht--these two German words should be compared to the dual sense of the English "awe", as seen in "awful" and "awesome", respectively).
So aidos could be translated as "modesty" (see the M-W entry for "shamefaced" above). And what about aiskhyne?
Aiskhyne derives from a verb meaning originally "to violate", in the first place in the sense of "to disfigure". To me it seems to be related to the word aiskhros--"ugly" in the sense of--disfigured...
The "ugly" man, as opposed to the (wo)man who is beautiful in the negative sense, is "ugly" due to the exercise of his organs of attack and defense--his spiritual as well as his corporeal ones--and of the attitude that corresponds to them. It is the exercise of these things that "disfigures" his negative (feminine) beauty.
There is thus a difference between shame in the sense of "modesty" (shyness, shame for one's "beauty") and shame in the sense of "disgrace" (shame for one's "ugliness").
"My brethren in war! I love you from the very heart. I am, and was ever, your counterpart. And I am also your best enemy. So let me tell you the truth!
I know the hatred and envy of your hearts. Ye are not great enough not to know of hatred and envy. Then be great enough not to be ashamed of them!
[...]
They call you heartless: but your heart is true, and I love the bashfulness of your goodwill. Ye are ashamed of your flow, and others are ashamed of their ebb.
Ye are ugly? Well then, my brethren, take the sublime about you, the mantle of the ugly!" (Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Of War and Warriors”.)
Much occasion for remarks again. First off, it is apparently "great", according to Zarathustra, to not be ashamed. Question: does this apply to both forms of shame, or only to aiskhyne? We shall look into this question later.
Secondly, the phrase "the bashfulness of your goodwill" is die Scham eurer Herzlichkeit in German, literally "the shame of your cordiality". Compare the following:
"With hard men intimacy is a thing of shame--and something precious." (BGE 167 whole.)
Those who posses feminine beauty are ashamed of their "ebb", i.e., of the fact that their beauty is wholly negative--that their organs of attack and defense have atrophied. Hence their shyness, i.e., their fear (shyness is a form or consequence of fear, i.e., of the feeling of a lack of power).
Note, by the way, the synonyms of "ebb" and "flow": "low tide" and "high tide", respectively. In this context these correspond to a low amount and a high amount of strength, respectively.
Lastly, the description of the sublime as "the mantle of the ugly" reminds me of Blake's Proverbs of Hell, one of which reads:
"Shame is Pride's cloke."
The word translated as "mantle" above, Mantel, may also be translated as "cloak".
Another of these proverbs reads: "The pride of the peacock is the glory of God." We should here think of Satan, and thereby of Prometheus...
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5. Prometheus and Eve.
"The legend of Prometheus is indigenous to the entire community of Aryan races and attests to their prevailing talent for profound and tragic vision. In fact, it is not improbable that this myth has the same characteristic importance for the Aryan mind as the myth of the Fall has for the Semitic, and that the two myths are related as brother and sister. [...] Man's highest good must be bought with a crime and paid for by the flood of grief and suffering which the offended divinities visit upon the human race in its noble ambition. An austere notion, this, which by the dignity it confers on crime presents a strange contrast to the Semitic myth of the Fall--a myth that exhibits curiosity, deception, suggestibility, concupiscence, in short a whole series of principally feminine frailties, as the root of all evil. [...] The Aryan nations assign to crime the male, the Semites to sin the female gender; and it is quite consistent with these notions that the original act of hubris [Frevel] should be attributed to a man, original sin to a woman." (The Birth of Tragedy, chapter 9.)
Here we see another instance of an opposition or contrast understood by Nietzsche as a man-woman relation: the Aryan and the Semitic, respectively. To me it seems the "brother-sister" relation between their myths is as follows.
In the Semitic myth of the Fall, the focus is on Eve, who accepts the serpent's gift of knowledge of good and evil. In the Aryan myth of Prometheus, the focus is on Prometheus, who brings man the gift of fire, which belonged to Zeus (even as the knowledge of good and evil belonged to God). So in the myth of the Fall, the focus is on the receiver, whereas in the myth of Prometheus, the focus is on the giver. Of course the male is also the "giver" of the seed, whereas the female is the receiver.
The above quote from The Birth of Tragedy is echoed in the following passage:
"The idealization of the man of great sacrilege [grossen Frevlers] (a sense of his greatness) is Greek; depreciation, slandering, contempt for the sinner is Judeo-Christian." (WP 845 (1885-86).)
Although the Greeks warned abundantly against hubris--Heraclitus for instance says it is more urgent to quench hubris than to quench a fire--, it was not a question of contempt: for the outrage of the hubristic man was that he set himself in a higher order--the order of the gods. Icarus for instance flew too closely to the sun--the god Helios--, so that the sun's rays melted the wax which stuck the feathers to his arms, destroying his wings and causing him to plunge to his death. But maybe his flight, which was "no middle flight", to speak with Milton, was worth even death?
"The titanic artist was strong in his defiant belief that he could create men and, at the least, destroy Olympian gods; this he was able to do by virtue of his superior wisdom, which, to be sure, he must atone for by eternal suffering. The glorious power "to do" [das herrliche "Können", a reference to the root of the word Kunst, "art"], which is possessed by great genius, and for which even eternal suffering is not too high a price to pay--the artist's austere pride--is of the very essence of Aeschylean poetry [the tragedy Prometheus Bound is by Aeschylus]". (BT 9.)
Though Zeus ordained that Prometheus be forever bound to the Caucasus for his crime, he was eventually unbound by Hercules. Likewise, according to some early Christian traditions, even Satan would be redeemed by Jesus at his Second Coming. Hercules was a son of Zeus and a mortal woman, even as Jesus was supposed to be the son of God and a mortal woman.
"What distinguishes the Aryan conception is an exalted notion of active sin as the properly Promethean virtue". (ibid.)
Eve's vice, on the other hand, was her seducibility; her "sin" consisted in her being seduced--it was therefore a passive sin. And of course the female is not traditionally considered the "passive" member in the equation for nothing: I will invoke again the act in which the male gives her his seed.
In describing the "aspirant to the grand style", Nietzsche says:
"It [the aspirant's ambition] repels; such men of force are no longer loved--a desert spreads around them, a silence, a fear as in the presence of some great sacrilege [Frevel]..." (WP 842.)
In his speech Of War and Warriors, Zarathustra advises the "ugly"--those who do not possess negative (i.e., feminine) beauty--to wrap themselves in the sublime, "the cloak of the ugly". The sublime (das Erhabene: the exalted, the august, the haughty) is also mentioned in The Birth of Tragedy:
"The truth once seen, man is aware everywhere of the ghastly absurdity of existence, comprehends the symbolism of Ophelia's fate and the wisdom of the wood sprite Silenus: nausea invades him. Then, in this supreme jeopardy of the will, art, that sorceress expert in healing, approaches him; only she can turn his fits of nausea into imaginations with which it is possible to live. These are on the one hand the sublime, which subjugates terror by means of art; on the other hand the comic, which releases us, through art, from the tedium of absurdity." (BT 7.)
In The Birth of Tragedy, these "imaginations with which it is possible to live" take the form of Tragedy and Comedy, respectively. The tragic hero was a sublime figure, or perhaps an ugly figure wrapped in the cloak of the ugly, the sublime. Prometheus for instance--the hero of Aeschylus' play--was not a god; he was a Titan. Now consider this:
"As a moral deity Apollo demands self-control from his people and, in order to observe such self-control, a knowledge of self. And so we find that the aesthetic necessity of beauty is accompanied by the imperatives, 'Know thyself,' and 'Nothing too much!' Conversely, excess and hubris [Selbstüberhebung] come to be regarded as the hostile spirits of the non-Apollinian sphere, hence as properties of the pre-Apollinian era--the age of Titans--and the extra-Apollinian world, that is to say the world of the barbarians. It was because of his Titanic love of man that Prometheus had to be devoured by vultures". (BT 4.)
The Apollinian Greeks are here contrasted by Nietzsche with the Titans--the pre-Apollinian Greeks--and the barbarians--the non-Greeks. Now let us look at this passage:
"The teaching meden agan ["nothing in excess"] applies to men of overflowing strength--not to the mediocre. The enkrateia ["temperance"] and askesis ["ascetic exercise"] is only a stage toward the heights: the "golden nature" is higher.
[...]
Higher than 'thou shalt' is 'I will' (the heroes); higher than 'I will' stands: 'I am' (the gods of the Greeks). The barbarian gods express nothing of the pleasure of restraint--are neither simple nor frivolous nor moderate." (WP 940.)
The heroes, like the Titan Prometheus, are men of overflowing strength, like the barbarians. The Titans as well as the barbarians are fearsome. But the sublimeness of the hero--the ugly man who has wrapped himself in the cloak of the ugly--does not yet constitute the grand style:
"The grand style arises when the beautiful carries off the victory over the monstrous." (The Wanderer And His Shadow, section 96, entire.)
This same insight we see in Thus Spake Zarathustra. The speech “Of War and Warriors” falls squarely within Part I. But squarely within Part II, in the speech “Of the Sublime Ones”, the sublime returns, and is judged by Zarathustra:
"A sublime one saw I today, a solemn one, a penitent of the spirit: Oh, how my soul laughed at his ugliness!
With upraised breast, and like those who draw in their breath: thus did he stand, the sublime one, and in silence:
O'erhung with ugly truths, the spoil of his hunting, and rich in torn raiment; many thorns also hung on him--but I saw no rose."
Compare this to The Birth of Tragedy:
"The Apollinian need for beauty had to develop the Olympian hierarchy of joy by slow degrees from the original titanic hierarchy of terror, as roses are seen to break from a thorny thicket." (BT 3.)
Zarathustra continues:
"Not yet had he learned laughing and beauty. Gloomy did this hunter return from the forest of knowledge.
From the fight with wild beasts returned he home: but even yet a wild beast gazeth out of his seriousness--an unconquered wild beast!"
This suggests the "wild beast" in him is to be conquered. By the way, the phrases "thou shalt" and "I will" in WP 940 (see above) cannot fail to remind the true Nietzschean of the first speech of Part I, “Of the Three Metamorphoses”. There the "thou shalt" is the "thou shalt" of the camel, imposed upon it by the dragon; and the "I will" is the "I will" of the lion. Now see what Zarathustra says next:
"As a tiger doth he [the sublime one] ever stand, on the point of springing; but I do not like those strained souls; ungracious is my taste towards all those self-engrossed ones."
We should only think of tigons and ligers to understand how close the lion and the tiger are. And indeed, Wikipedia tells us:
"Rare reports have been made of tigresses mating with lions in the wild." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liger)
The grand style only arises when the metamorphosis of the lion into the child has come about:
"He hath subdued monsters, he hath solved enigmas. But he should also redeem his monsters and enigmas; into heavenly children should he transform them." (TSZ, ibid.)
This reminds me of the lion with the flock of doves, prophesied in the speech “Of Old and New Tables” (in Part III), and met by Zarathustra in “The Sign”, the last chapter of the book (in Part IV). Birds are of course a kind of "heavenly children". Now consider this:
"Elsewhere we read of heroes, like Siegfried in the Nordic legend, who understands this language of the birds as soon as they have overcome the dragon, and the symbolism in question may be easily understood from this. Victory over the dragon has, as its immediate consequence, the conquest of immortality, which is represented by some object, the approach to which is barred by the dragon, and the conquest of immortality implies, essentially, reintegration at the center of the human state, that is, at the point where communication is established with higher states of being. It is this communication that is represented by the understanding of the language of the birds." (René Guénon, 'The Language of the Birds', as quoted in Claudia Crawford's essay, “Nietzsche's Dionysian arts”.)
The conquest of immortality: the hero's becoming a god. The dragon is a "subdued monster" which has yet got to be "redeemed"...
"Fossil evidence and intensive biological analyses have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that birds are theropod dinosaurs." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird#Dinosaurs_and_the_origin_of_birds)
As you will probably know, the term "dinosaur" is derived from the Greek words deinos, "terrible", and saura, "lizard".
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6. Pride and vanity.
Formerly we had two antitheses. I will recapitulate:
Masculine--------------------Feminine
Classical----------------------Modern
Strengthening---------------Weakening
Will to be terrible-----------Will to please
Positive ugliness------------Negative beauty
Phobos----------------------- Eros
Great passion----------------Small passion
Shame ("disgrace")----------Shame ("modesty")
Flow-------------------------- Ebb
Much force-------------------Little force
Aryan-------------------------Semitic
Prometheus (serpent)-------Eve
Giver--------------------------Receiver
Awe--------------------------- Contempt
Hubris------------------------ Sin
Active-------------------------Passive
I will introduce one new pair to this list: Pride and Vanity. Vanity is actually a lack of Pride. The vain (wo)man is primarily concerned with public approval, whereas the proud man is indifferent to that. "Vanity" is therefore a name for a relative lack of Pride; and "Pride", as normally used, is the name for a relative abundance of it.
"Male pride" is of course a standing expression; and so, perhaps, is "female vanity".
Pride-------------------------- Vanity
But I want to introduce a new opposition here. In fact, it has already been announced in the preceding section. Again, it concerns a quantitative difference. Yes, there is an even higher realm than the realm hitherto designated as the "masculine".
Consider again the passage about heroes like Siegfried quoted in section 5. Elsewhere, I quoted the exact same passage, and immediately continued:
The Christ is such a symbol of the Self; in fact, he "is" the Self of Western man, according to Jung (according to Miguel Serrano). But as I also said elsewhere;
This is not completely right; that is to say, those two halves are not simply the Christ and the Antichrist:
"For anyone who has a positive attitude towards Christianity the problem of the Antichrist is a hard nut to crack. It is nothing less than the counterstroke of the devil, provoked by God's Incarnation; for the devil attains his true stature as the adversary of Christ, and hence of God, only after the rise of Christianity, while as late as the Book of Job he was still one of God's sons and on familiar terms with Yahweh. Psychologically the case is clear, since the dogmatic figure of Christ is so sublime and spotless that everything else turns dark beside it. It is, in fact, so one-sidedly perfect that it demands a psychic complement to restore the balance. This inevitable opposition led very early to the doctrine of the two sons of God, of whom the elder was called Satanaël. The coming of the Antichrist is not just a prophetic prediction--it is an inexorable psychological law[.]" (Jung, ibid.)
Further on in this chapter, Jung writes:
"In the (Jewish-Christian?) apocalypse, the 'ascension of Isaiah,' we find, in the middle section, Isaiah's vision of the seven heavens through which he was rapt. First he saw Sammaël and his hosts, against whom a 'great battle' was raging in the firmament."
This is the battle described in Book VI of Paradise Lost. There the leading angel is of course called Satan.
The Dutch poet Adriaan Roland Holst once wrote:
"Had Lucifer been vain, he would never have fallen. Pride caused him to fall, until he split the nucleus of life, and arose in the second pride: the pride of death."
The last bit is probably a reference to the Angel of Death, Samael or Sammael, who, as Wikipedia tells me, is said to have "tempted Eve in the guise of the Serpent" (this corresponds to Book IX of Paradise Lost, where the angel tempting Eve is again Satan, of course).
Let us again invoke Blake's "Proverb of Hell": "The pride of the peacock is the glory of God." The peacock is the male of its species; the female is called "peahen". (Note that again the masculine version is called by the general name, as with "pride" and "vanity".) The peacock's tail--indeed, even the peahen's tail--can be terrifying:
"The female can also display her plumage to ward off female competition or danger to her young." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peacock)
And yet when a person is compared to a peacock, what is meant is that he is vain, not proud. Likewise, Satan in his "original glory" was still vain, not proud; when he got truly proud his pride caused him to fall. Notice how feminine Blake's Satan in His Original Glory looks!
The "glory" of the Christian God is vanity, not pride. As soon as Satan got proud, he was cast out of heaven: "God" could not stand a proud, masculine being beside "him"! Compare the following:
"The Ephesians would do well to hang themselves, every grown man of them, and leave the city to beardless lads; for they have cast out Hermodorus, the best man among them, saying, 'We will have none who is best among us; if there be any such, let him be so elsewhere and among others.'" (Heraclitus.)
Blake's God, however, was not the Christian God:
"But in the Book of Job, Milton's Messiah is call'd Satan.
For this history has been adopted by both parties.
It indeed appeared to Reason as if Desire was cast out; but the Devil's account is, that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.
This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter, or Desire, that Reason may have Ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he who dwells in flaming fire." (Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.)
Originally, Blake had written "no other than the Devil who dwells in flaming fire"; but he had expunged "the Devil", preferring to keep it implicit. What is implied is the the Jehovah of the Bible is the Devil, though, and that therefore the Devil is the true God. Compare Nietzsche:
"Let us remove supreme goodness from the concept of God: it is unworthy of a God. [...] No! God the supreme power--that suffices! Everything follows from it, 'the world' follows from it!" (The Will to Power, section 1037.)
As for the Jehovah (Yahweh) of the Bible: Jung writes the following about him.
"Perhaps we may risk the conjecture that problem of the Yahwistic God-image, which had been constellated in men's minds ever since the Book of Job, continued to be discussed in Gnostic circles and in syncretistic Judaism generally, all the more eagerly as the Christian answer to this question--namely the unanimous decision in favour of God's goodness--did not satisfy the conservative Jews. In this respect, therefore, it is significant that the doctrine of the two antithetical sons of God originated with the Jewish Christians living in Palestine. Inside Christianity itself the doctrine spread to the Bogomils and the Cathars; in Judaism it influenced religious speculation and found lasting expression in the two sides of the cabalistic Tree of the Sephiroth, which were named hesed (love) and din (justice)." (Jung, ibid.)
Actually, hesed and din are the names of two opposing Sephiroth ("spheres") on the Tree of Life; the two sides, both of which encompass three of such spheres, are actually called the Pillars of Mercy and of Severity, respectively.
I quoted Jung in saying "For anyone who has a positive attitude towards Christianity the problem of the Antichrist is a hard nut to crack." But for us Nietzscheans, who don't have positive attitude toward Christianity, the nut may seem easy to crack in the light of what I wrote elsewhere, where I wrote:
If it was this simple, we could discard the whole Pillar of Mercy and be content to climb the Pillar of Severity. But it's not that simple. For Zarathustra says:
"As yet hath his [the sublime one's] knowledge not learned to smile, and to be without jealousy [compare the "envy" mentioned in Of War and Warriors]; as yet hath his gushing passion not become calm in beauty.
Verily, not in satiety shall his longing cease and disappear, but in beauty! Gracefulness [die Anmut, "charm"] belongeth to the munificence of the magnanimous.
His arm across his head: thus should the hero repose; thus should he also surmount his repose.
But precisely to the hero is beauty the hardest thing of all. Unattainable is beauty by all ardent wills.
A little more, a little less: precisely this is much here, it is the most here.
To stand with relaxed muscles and with unharnessed will: that is the hardest for all of you, ye sublime ones!
When power becometh gracious [gnädig, "merciful"] and descendeth into the visible--I call such condescension, beauty.
And from no one do I want beauty so much as from thee, thou powerful one: let thy goodness be thy last self-conquest.
All evil do I accredit to thee: therefore do I desire of thee the good.
Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings, who think themselves good because they have crippled paws!
The virtue of the pillar shalt thou strive after: more beautiful doth it ever become, and more graceful [zart, "tender, gentle"]--but internally harder and more sustaining--the higher it riseth.
Yea, thou sublime one, one day shalt thou also be beautiful, and hold up the mirror to thine own beauty.
Then will thy soul thrill with divine desires; and there will be adoration even in thy vanity!
For this is the secret of the soul: when the hero hath abandoned it, then only approacheth it in dreams--the super-hero." (TSZ, "The Sublime Ones".)
The last remark is a reference to Ariadne (the soul), who was abandoned by Theseus (the hero) and then approached by Dionysus (the super-hero (Über-Held)).
You will have noted the mention of vanity.
This is actually a description of the grand style. The pillar becomes ever more beautiful (on the outside), and ever harder (on the inside). It thus becomes more "severe" on the inside and more "merciful" on the outside. It is therefore a "synthesis" of the pillars of mercy and of severity. And indeed, there is a third pillar in the middle of the Tree of Life, called the Pillar of Equilibrium. Jung cites the following remark about Yahweh:
"God's left hand dashes to pieces; his right hand is glorious to save." (Jung, ibid.)
On the human body, the left arm corresponds to the Sephira din, also called geburah, "strength", which is the "katabolic Sephira", whereas the right arm corresponds to the Sephira hesed, "love", which is the "anabolic Sephira". Yahweh thus wields over both the "beautiful" (in the negative sense), the pleasing, and the "ugly"--the terrible. Now hear Heidegger's "definition" of the grand style:
"In contrast to classicism, the classical is nothing that can be immediately divined from a particular past period of art. It is instead a basic structure of Dasein, which itself first creates the conditions for any such period and must first open itself and devote itself to those conditions. But the fundamental condition is an equally original freedom with regard to the extreme opposites, chaos and law; not the mere subjection of chaos to a form, but that mastery which enables the primal wilderness of chaos and the primordiality of law to advance under the same yoke, invariably bound to one another with equal necessity. Such mastery is unconstrained disposition over that yoke, which is as equally removed from the paralysis of form in what is dogmatic and formalistic as from sheer rapturous tumult. Wherever unconstrained disposition over that yoke is an event's self-imposed law, there is the grand style[.]" (Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. I, chapter 17.)
I will analyse this passage in the next section.
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7. The white bull and the tiger.
"A little more, a little less: precisely this is much here, it is the most here." (TSZ, "The Sublime Ones".)
Whereas the hero wills ever more, Zarathustra here says only a little more, or even a little less, is much and the most here. Moderation.
"To stand with relaxed muscles and with unharnessed will: that is the hardest for all of you, ye sublime ones!" (ibid.)
And therefore that which "ye" should strive for.
"When power becometh gracious [gnädig, "merciful"] and descendeth into the visible--I call such condescension, beauty." (ibid.)
When the invisible God descends into the sphere of Tiphareth, the Christ-center...
"And from no one do I want beauty so much as from thee, thou powerful one: let thy goodness be thy last self-conquest.
All evil do I accredit to thee: therefore do I desire of thee the good.
Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings, who think themselves good because they have crippled paws!" (ibid.)
'All ugliness do I accredit to thee: therefore do I desire of thee the beautiful.
Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings, who think themselves beautiful because they have atrophied organs of attack and defense!'
Now as for Heidegger.
"In contrast to classicism, the classical is nothing that can be immediately divined from a particular past period of art. It is instead a basic structure of Dasein, which itself first creates the conditions for any such period and must first open itself and devote itself to those conditions. But the fundamental condition is an equally original freedom with regard to the extreme opposites, chaos and law; not the mere subjection of chaos to a form, but that mastery which enables the primal wilderness of chaos and the primordiality of law to advance under the same yoke, invariably bound to one another with equal necessity. Such mastery is unconstrained disposition over that yoke, which is as equally removed from the paralysis of form in what is dogmatic and formalistic as from sheer rapturous tumult. Wherever unconstrained disposition over that yoke is an event's self-imposed law, there is the grand style".
[Heidegger, 'Nietzsche', Vol. I, chapter 17.]
The classical is a basic structure of Dasein. Dasein, which usually means "existence" in German, in Heidegger refers to the human being, which he conceives as a "being-there" (Da-sein).
Dasein first creates the conditions for any classical period of art (and thereby for any period of art as a
whole), and must open itself and devote itself to those conditions. So it must devote itself to what it has itself created.
The fundamental one among these conditions is a freedom which is equally original toward the extreme opposites, chaos and law. Chaos is not simply subjected to law (to a form), but this freedom is a mastery
"which enables the primal wilderness of chaos and the primordiality of law to advance under the same yoke". It thus subjects, or rather sub-jugates (literally), both chaos and law. This does not mean they are subjugated with force, though; they are enabled to advance together under the same yoke--almost as if they would do so voluntarily. Compare again "The Sublime Ones", where Zarathustra says:
"As the bull ought he [the sublime one] to do; and his happiness should smell of the earth, and not of contempt for the earth.
As a white bull would I like to see him, which, snorting and lowing, walketh before the plough-share: and his lowing should also laud all that is earthly!"
Note that this is the same sublime one who was previously compared to a tiger. The tiger represents chaos, the terrifying aspect of reality. Why should it willingly advance under a yoke?
In Hinduism, the steed of the goddess Durga is a tiger. "She is [...] considered the fiercer, demon-fighting form of Shiva's wife, goddess Parvati." (Wikipedia, "Durga".) Shiva's steed is a white bull. This
suggests the "tiger" is still relatively feminine (weak) when compared to the "white bull". Shiva, though a supremely masculine deity (he is worshipped as the lingam, a phallus symbol), has decidedly
androgynous characteristics. This is because he is a "master" (ishvara), who enables both the "masculine" (the terrible) and the "feminine" (the pleasing) to advance under the same yoke.
Heidegger continues:
"Such mastery is unconstrained disposition [Walten, "wielding"] over that yoke, which is as equally removed from the paralysis of form in what is dogmatic and formalistic as from sheer rapturous tumult
[Wagner]. Wherever unconstrained disposition over that yoke is an event's self-imposed law, there is the grand style".
It is self-imposed because it is the fundamental condition to which what had created it is itself devoted.
P.S.: The statement "Beauty is terror" is actually from The Secret History, by Donna Tartt--a good novel, though I like her second one, The Little Friend, much better--reading that was profoundly satisfying.
The statement "Every thing of power is a sight to behold" is really a rendition of a statement by Moody Lawless.
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8. The way up and the way down.
In "Of the Sublime Ones", Zarathustra says:
"When power becometh gracious and descendeth into the visible--I call such condescension, beauty."
The word here translated as "gracious" is gnädig, "merciful" (compare "divine grace"). We should therefore think of the terrible, invisible God Yahweh here, who descended into the visible in the form of his avatar, Christ (note that avatara means "descent" in Sanskrit).
What I'm trying to say here is that the beauty of the powerful one does not consist in his ascending to an even greater height than positive ugliness, but in descending into the sphere of negative beauty. His will to descend there is terrible, though:
"Passion for power [Herrschsucht, "addiction to ruling"]: but who would call it passion, when the height longeth to stoop for power! Verily, nothing sick or diseased [Süchtiges] is there in such longing and descending!
That the lonesome height may not forever remain lonesome and self-sufficing; that the mountains may come to the valleys and the winds of the heights to the plains:
Oh, who could find the right prenomen and honouring name for such longing! 'Bestowing virtue'--thus did Zarathustra once name the unnamable." ("Of the Three Evils".)
And in his speech "Of the Bestowing Virtue", Zarathustra describes this longing thus:
"When your heart overfloweth broad and full like the river, a blessing and a danger to the lowlanders: there is the origin of your virtue."
An ab-undance that may quench the thirst of the lowlanders, but may also drown them (hence "a blessing and a danger"). This "loving one's will" (ibid.) is not a will to please: for it does not focus on what the receiver might want, but on what the giver wants: to give, even if it means to flood the receiver. Thus such "loving ones" are selfish in the good sense:
"[...] the wholesome, healthy selfishness, that springeth from the powerful soul:--
From the powerful soul, to which the high body appertaineth, the handsome, triumphing, refreshing body, around which everything becometh a mirror". ("Of the Three Evils".)
This good selfishness is not only contrasted with bad selfishness (the former wants to take in order to give; the latter wants to take in order to have); it is also contrasted with selflessness:
"With its words of good and bad doth such self-enjoyment shelter itself as with sacred groves; with the names of its happiness doth it banish from itself everything contemptible.
Away from itself doth it banish everything cowardly; it saith: 'Bad--that is cowardly!' Contemptible seem to it the ever-solicitous, the sighing, the complaining, and whoever pick up the most trifling
advantage. [Compare HATH 411! That section ties such concern with "trifling advantages" directly to the feminine.]
[...]
And spurious wisdom: so doth it call all the wit that slaves, and hoary-headed and weary ones affect; and especially all the cunning, spurious-witted, curious-witted foolishness of priests!
The spurious wise, however, all the priests, the world-weary, and those whose souls are of feminine and servile nature--oh, how hath their game all along abused selfishness!
And precisely that was to be virtue and was to be called virtue--to abuse selfishness! And 'selfless'--so did they wish themselves with good reason, all those world-weary cowards and cross-spiders!
But to all those cometh now the day, the change, the sword of judgment, the great noontide: then shall many things be revealed!
And he who proclaimeth the ego wholesome and holy, and selfishness blessed, verily, he, the prognosticator, speaketh also what he knoweth: 'Behold, it cometh, it is nigh, the great noontide!'
Thus spake Zarathustra." (ibid.)
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9. The crab and the pillar.
The powerful one's shame for his "goodwill" (cordiality) and intimacy is, like the negatively beautiful one's shame for her beauty, aidos, bashfulness. And this bashfulness is shyness, a form of fear. The negatively beautiful one, being beautiful due to the atrophy of her organs of attack and defense, shies away because she is afraid of being hurt; likewise, the powerful one hides his "goodwill" behind his
hardness, his ugliness, because he's afraid of being hurt in his soft spot. He is thus like Cancer in astrology: the Crab, who has an exo-skeleton, preserving his soft flesh inside his ugly shell.
"The eye looks vulgar
Inside its ugly shell.
Come out in the open
In all of your Brilliance."
(Jim Morrison, The Lords.)
Thus Zarathustra spurs the powerful one to overcome his weakness:
"And from no one do I want beauty so much as from thee, thou powerful one: let thy goodness be thy last self-conquest.
[...]
The virtue of the pillar shalt thou strive after: more beautiful doth it ever become, and more graceful--but internally harder and more sustaining--the higher it riseth." ("Of the Sublime Ones".)
The pillar is beautiful on the outside and hard on the inside--the converse of the Crab.
Visibility of happiness, and (psychological) nakedness, are terrifying because they suggest that the one who allows his happiness to become visible is strong enough to show his sensitive side.
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10. Shame and shamelessness.
In his Nachlass, in the only place he ever mentions aidos, as fas as I know, Nietzsche says:
"Aidos is the emotion [Regung] and shyness [Scheu; LEO translates this as "awe, dread, timidity"], not to [want to] offend gods, men, and eternal laws: that is, the instinct of reverence [Ehrfurcht] as customary with good [noble] men. A kind of revulsion at the offending of the honourable [Ehrwürdigen].
"The Greek aversion against immoderation [das Übermass], in the joyful i[nstinct] of hubris, the transgression [die Überschreitung] of one's own boundaries, is most noble [vornehm]--and paleo-aristocratic [altadelig]! The offending of aidos is a ghastly sight for those who are used to aidos." (Nachlass Spring-Summer 1883 7 [161].)
I contend that aidos, however noble it may be when it's become second nature, is at bottom shame for one's weakness.
In section 4, I wrote:
"[...] it is apparently "great", according to Zarathustra, to not be ashamed. Question: does this apply to both forms of shame, or only to aiskhyne? We shall look into this question later."
I will look into this question now. I say it applies only to aiskhyne. It is great (noble) to feel shame (aidos) at one's own weakness, as it is honest to do so. One should compare Nietzsche's meditations on the Greek word esthlos in GM I, 5. (Note: "honesty" is cognate with "honour".)
Now we can paraphrase Zarathustra (TSZ, "Of War and Warriors") as follows:
"Shame--that is the distinction [Vornehmheit] of the weakling. Let your distinction be shamelessness!"
The great should feel aidos for their relative weakness (e.g., their negative beauty), but no aiskhyne for their relative strength (e.g., their positive ugliness).
Central to Nietzsche's philosophy is the feminine, or rather the difference between the masculine and the feminine ("feminine" is a relative term!). Thus he opens his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), as follows.
"Much will have been gained for aesthetics once we have succeeded in apprehending directly-- rather than merely ascertaining--that art owes its continuous evolution to the Apollinian-Dionysian duality, even as the propagation of the species depends on the duality of the sexes, their constant conflicts and periodic acts of reconciliation."
This is the first sentence of the first section of his first book. But it does not end here. In the first sentence of the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil (1886), he compares truth--a central concept for a philosopher, I should say!--to a woman; and in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-85), his mystical poetic work, he regards Life, Eternity, Happiness, and Wisdom as women.
All this may serve to confirm to what extent his healthy heterosexual attunement toward the feminine permeated his thought. And indeed, he himself writes, in the aforementioned Beyond Good and Evil:
"The degree and kind of a man's sexuality reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit." (section 75 whole.)
Be it then proclaimed that Nietzsche's masculinity, and thereby his attunement toward the feminine, and thus the difference between the masculine and the feminine, are of the essence of his philosophy. It is from this basic difference that the dualities found throughout his work derive: the Apollinian and the Dionysian (later the Dionysian and the Christian), the Classical and the Modern, the strong and the weak, the Masters and the Slaves, etc. It is therefore a very fruitful enterprise to study his ideas about man and woman; it may even unlock Nietzsche's philosophy for us.
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Part I: The Masculine and the Feminine.
1. The will to please and the will to be terrible.
First I will assert that the Classical and the Modern correspond to the masculine and the feminine for Nietzsche. We may later see why this is so; but right now, I will suppose a sufficient familiarity with Nietzsche's writings in my readers so as to be able to appreciate this correspondence even if one hadn't realised it yet.
I will contrast the masculine and the feminine by the hand of two passages, both from The Will to Power. The first is about woman; the second about the Classical.
"Would any link at all be missing in the chain of art and science if woman, if the work of woman were missing? Admitting exceptions--they prove the rule--woman attains perfection in everything that is not a work: in letters, in memoirs, even in the most delicate handiwork, in short in everything that is not a métier—precisely because in these things she perfects herself, because she here obeys the only artistic impulse she has--she wants to please..." (section 817 (1887-88).)
"Classical taste: that is the will to simplification, strengthening, to visibility of happiness, to terribleness, the courage of psychological nakedness (--simplification is a consequence of the will to strengthening; allowing happiness to become visible, as well as nakedness, a consequence of the will to terribleness...).” (section 868 (1887-88).)
Both translations are versions of the Walter Kaufmann translation, corrected by yours truly in accordance with the German original. Kaufmann translates "the will to terribleness" as "the will to be terrible", which is indeed what is meant ("terrible" in the sense of "fearful, terrifying"). This translation makes it easier to see the contrast between
the will to be terrible
the will to please.
Now in the second passage, Nietzsche first mentions five different things (the will to simplification, to strengthening, to visibility of happiness, to terribleness, and the courage of psychological nakedness), and then orders these in two groups, or rather: he uses two of them to categorise the other three, into consequences of the one and consequences of the other. Thus he basically mentions only two different things: the will to strengthening and the will to be terrible.
If we contrast the will to be terrible with the will to please, the corresponding contrast is between the will to strengthening and the will to weakening. Why should anyone want to become weaker? Because one thereby becomes more pleasing. Thus the will to weakening is a means of the will to please, and therefore the will to strengthening is a means of the will to be terrible. And the will to please is a form of the will to power: by being pleasing to him, woman wills power over man. Therefore the will to be terrible is the corresponding masculine form of the will to power.
One could counter that the will to please is only woman's only artistic impulse, and not the essence of her being. But as Heidegger says--and this is firmly grounded in Nietzsche--, "will to power finds its supreme configuration [Gestalt] in art" (Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. I, chapter 12, trans. Farrell Krell). And as "this world is the will to power--and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power--and nothing besides!" (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1067), the will to please is the supreme configuration of woman's very being.
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2. Negative and positive beauty.
"Custom and beauty.--In favour of custom let it not be kept quiet that in whomever subjects himself to it completely and wholeheartedly and from the very beginning, the organs of attack and defense--the corporeal as well as the spiritual ones--atrophy: that is to say, he becomes increasingly more beautiful! For it is the exercise of those organs and of the attitude that corresponds to them that keeps ugly and makes uglier. For this reason the old baboon is uglier than the young, and the female young baboon is most akin to man: thus the most beautiful.--From this one should draw a conclusion regarding the origin of the beauty of women!" (Nietzsche, Dawn of Day, section 25 whole, my translation.)
This explains how one's weakening can increase one's power to please. For the atrophy of one's corporeal and spiritual organs of attack and defense--which follows from the lack of the exercise of those organs and the corresponding attitude--apparently makes people as well as baboons aesthetically more pleasing to people. But one will see that this is a wholly negative beauty.
Nietzsche says the exercise of those organs and of the attitude that corresponds to them keeps ugly and makes uglier. But "ugly" is hässlich in German, literally "hately"--hateful in the sense of
"arousing hatred". This hatred is aroused not because the "hately" one is lacking something, but to the contrary, because he has something in excess. He is too formidable for us, too terrible to be a pleasant sight to us.
The "ugly one", as opposed to the beautiful one whose beauty is wholly negative, is too formidable for us, too terrible to be a pleasant sight to us.
"It is a question of strength [Kraft] (of an individual or of a people), whether and where the judgment "beautiful" is applied. The feeling of plenitude, of dammed-up strength (which permits one to meet with courage and good-humor much that makes the weakling shudder)--the feeling of power applies the judgment "beautiful" even to things and conditions that the instinct of impotence could only find hateful and "ugly" [hassenswert, "hässlich"]. The nose for what we could still barely deal with if it confronted us in the flesh--as danger, problem, temptation--this determines even our aesthetic Yes. ("That is beautiful" is an affirmation.)" (The Will to Power, section 852.)
But this passage presents us with a problem. For is the beautiful only that which we're up to? That is, which we're sufficiently strong to subdue? Must the beautiful always be something we see, or can imagine, beneath us? From a man's perspective it may seem so; but what about a woman's perspective? If a man finds a woman beautiful in the negative sense, as someone he sees beneath himself in strength, she cannot see him in the same way, of course (supposing they see things as they are, i.e., they are not mistaken about each other's strength). And yet they may be attracted to each other--that is, she may also be attracted to him. So there is also a positive beauty, though it's not aesthetically "pleasing". It is rather that beauty which, as Moody Lawless once said, "is terror": as "every thing of power is a sight to behold". The latter quotation may not be exact.
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3. Eros and phobos.
In Miguel Serrano's NOS, a conversation between him and Jung is recorded. In the course of that, Jung says:
"Eros was united with his Beloved inside the Great Orphic, Cosmic Egg: Phanes, Erika Paios. Eros unites, but Phobos, fear, hatred (nothing is closer to love than hatred) disunites, leads to separation, breaks the Cosmic Egg. So as to acquire consciousness, individuality, so as to be able one day to give a face to the Cosmic Egg." (from the chapter “Another Turn of the Wheel”.)
According to Jung, the Greek phobos (as in "hydrophobic", water-repellent) may mean both "fear" and "hatred"; and it stands opposed to eros. The thing is that eros seeks to diminish the gulf between two beings, whereas phobos seeks to widen it. That gulf arouses the pathos of distance.
"Erôs arises in response to the gulf that separates the exemplary human being from all others, and it naturally aspires to bridge this gulf. While the self-overflowing emanations of the will establish and preserve the pathos of distance, erôs strives to eliminate or minimize the distance between lover and beloved." (Daniel W. Conway, “Love's labor's lost”.)
Thus an "ugly" being, as measured by the negative concept of beauty--feminine beauty--, may arouse the eros of beings that are "beautiful" in this sense. It is precisely the former's phobos, its fearsomeness,--that which sets it apart, and wills to do so--which arouses the latter's eros: by creating a gulf, a barrier, a desert around the former:
"The greatness of an artist cannot be measured by the 'beautiful feelings' he arouses: leave that idea to females. But according to the degree to which he approaches the grand style, to which he is capable of the grand style. This style has this in common with great passion, that it disdains to please[!]; that it forgets to persuade; that it commands; that it wills-- To become master of the chaos one is; to compel one's chaos to become form; to become logical, simple, unambiguous, mathematics, law--that is the grand ambition here.-- It repels[!]; such men of force are no longer loved--a desert [Einöde, "solitude"] spreads around them, a silence, a fear as in the presence of some great sacrilege--" (The Will to Power, section 842.)
When Nietzsche says "such men of force are no longer loved" (nichts reizt mehr die Liebe zu solchen Gewaltmenschen, "nothing arouses the love toward such force-men anymore"), he means they are no longer amiable to anyone anymore; they do arouse "love" in the sense of erôs...
"Other forms of love, such as agape, the universal, spiritual love praised in the Gospel of John, may certainly play an important role within specific cultural settings, but they cannot serve to found or constitute culture. The founding of culture requires as its catalyst nothing less than erôs, the most powerful, discriminating, egoistic and dangerous form of love known to humankind". (Conway, ibid.)
And to return to the relationship between great passion and the grand style: Nietzsche elsewhere writes:
"A period when the old masquerade and moral decking-up of the affects arouses antipathy: naked nature[!]; where the decisiveness of quanta of power is simply admitted (as determining rank); where the grand style appears again as the consequence of grand passion." (The Will to Power, section 1024 whole.)
Here we see Nietzsche's view is indeed (compare the "problem" mentioned in the preceding section) wholly quantitative. And indeed, Nietzsche elsewhere distinguishes between man and woman precisely on the basis of the quantity of their passion:
"The female intellect.--Women's intellect is manifested as perfect control [not unsettled by passion], presence of mind [unclouded by passion], and utilization of all advantages [because less passion means less advantages]. [... W]omen have the intelligence, men the heart and passion. This is not contradicted by the fact that men actually get so much farther with their intelligence: they have the deeper, more powerful drives; these take their intelligence, which is in itself something passive, forward." (Human, All Too Human, aphorism 411.)
Spiritually, man and woman are gradations which behave as opposites. The difference between them follows from a difference in passion: man has much, woman has little. And the great style follows from great passion. Therefore woman is incapable of the grand style.
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4. Aidos and aiskhyne.
This thread was actually inspired by thoughts on shame and shyness. I haven't mentioned these things at all in my thread so far, if I'm not mistaken.
Shame is directly related to beauty in the negative sense (feminine beauty):
"Shamefacedness.--Women's shamefacedness generally increases with their beauty." (HATH 398 whole.)
Much occasion for remarks here. First off, the word here translated as "shamefacedness", Schamhaftigkeit, is rendered on The Nietzsche Channel as "modesty". Also, the word here translated as "women" is Frauen, which means "gentlewomen" as opposed to women in general, Weiber, common women. Of course, it is only "gentlewomen" that are beautiful: beauty is no accident.
LEO renders "Schamhaftigkeit" solely as "shamefacedness. And Merriam-Webster defines "shamefaced" as:
"1 : showing modesty : BASHFUL
2 : showing shame : ASHAMED"
The difference between these two things may be illustrated by what the third of my three most-frequented dictionary sites, the OED, says about shame:
"Gk. distinguished shame in the bad sense of 'disgrace, dishonor' (aiskhyne) from shame in the good sense of 'modesty, bashfulness' (aidos)."
Also, let us immediately notice that "shamefaced" has nothing to do with the word "face", but is a corruption of "shamefast" (see the OED).
Now let us look closer to the Greek words mentioned above. Aidos originally meant "shyness", in the original sense of a "shying away from, avoiding". It essentially has to do with a sense of fear (German Furcht) or respect (German Ehrfurcht--these two German words should be compared to the dual sense of the English "awe", as seen in "awful" and "awesome", respectively).
So aidos could be translated as "modesty" (see the M-W entry for "shamefaced" above). And what about aiskhyne?
Aiskhyne derives from a verb meaning originally "to violate", in the first place in the sense of "to disfigure". To me it seems to be related to the word aiskhros--"ugly" in the sense of--disfigured...
The "ugly" man, as opposed to the (wo)man who is beautiful in the negative sense, is "ugly" due to the exercise of his organs of attack and defense--his spiritual as well as his corporeal ones--and of the attitude that corresponds to them. It is the exercise of these things that "disfigures" his negative (feminine) beauty.
There is thus a difference between shame in the sense of "modesty" (shyness, shame for one's "beauty") and shame in the sense of "disgrace" (shame for one's "ugliness").
"My brethren in war! I love you from the very heart. I am, and was ever, your counterpart. And I am also your best enemy. So let me tell you the truth!
I know the hatred and envy of your hearts. Ye are not great enough not to know of hatred and envy. Then be great enough not to be ashamed of them!
[...]
They call you heartless: but your heart is true, and I love the bashfulness of your goodwill. Ye are ashamed of your flow, and others are ashamed of their ebb.
Ye are ugly? Well then, my brethren, take the sublime about you, the mantle of the ugly!" (Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Of War and Warriors”.)
Much occasion for remarks again. First off, it is apparently "great", according to Zarathustra, to not be ashamed. Question: does this apply to both forms of shame, or only to aiskhyne? We shall look into this question later.
Secondly, the phrase "the bashfulness of your goodwill" is die Scham eurer Herzlichkeit in German, literally "the shame of your cordiality". Compare the following:
"With hard men intimacy is a thing of shame--and something precious." (BGE 167 whole.)
Those who posses feminine beauty are ashamed of their "ebb", i.e., of the fact that their beauty is wholly negative--that their organs of attack and defense have atrophied. Hence their shyness, i.e., their fear (shyness is a form or consequence of fear, i.e., of the feeling of a lack of power).
Note, by the way, the synonyms of "ebb" and "flow": "low tide" and "high tide", respectively. In this context these correspond to a low amount and a high amount of strength, respectively.
Lastly, the description of the sublime as "the mantle of the ugly" reminds me of Blake's Proverbs of Hell, one of which reads:
"Shame is Pride's cloke."
The word translated as "mantle" above, Mantel, may also be translated as "cloak".
Another of these proverbs reads: "The pride of the peacock is the glory of God." We should here think of Satan, and thereby of Prometheus...
::
5. Prometheus and Eve.
"The legend of Prometheus is indigenous to the entire community of Aryan races and attests to their prevailing talent for profound and tragic vision. In fact, it is not improbable that this myth has the same characteristic importance for the Aryan mind as the myth of the Fall has for the Semitic, and that the two myths are related as brother and sister. [...] Man's highest good must be bought with a crime and paid for by the flood of grief and suffering which the offended divinities visit upon the human race in its noble ambition. An austere notion, this, which by the dignity it confers on crime presents a strange contrast to the Semitic myth of the Fall--a myth that exhibits curiosity, deception, suggestibility, concupiscence, in short a whole series of principally feminine frailties, as the root of all evil. [...] The Aryan nations assign to crime the male, the Semites to sin the female gender; and it is quite consistent with these notions that the original act of hubris [Frevel] should be attributed to a man, original sin to a woman." (The Birth of Tragedy, chapter 9.)
Here we see another instance of an opposition or contrast understood by Nietzsche as a man-woman relation: the Aryan and the Semitic, respectively. To me it seems the "brother-sister" relation between their myths is as follows.
In the Semitic myth of the Fall, the focus is on Eve, who accepts the serpent's gift of knowledge of good and evil. In the Aryan myth of Prometheus, the focus is on Prometheus, who brings man the gift of fire, which belonged to Zeus (even as the knowledge of good and evil belonged to God). So in the myth of the Fall, the focus is on the receiver, whereas in the myth of Prometheus, the focus is on the giver. Of course the male is also the "giver" of the seed, whereas the female is the receiver.
The above quote from The Birth of Tragedy is echoed in the following passage:
"The idealization of the man of great sacrilege [grossen Frevlers] (a sense of his greatness) is Greek; depreciation, slandering, contempt for the sinner is Judeo-Christian." (WP 845 (1885-86).)
Although the Greeks warned abundantly against hubris--Heraclitus for instance says it is more urgent to quench hubris than to quench a fire--, it was not a question of contempt: for the outrage of the hubristic man was that he set himself in a higher order--the order of the gods. Icarus for instance flew too closely to the sun--the god Helios--, so that the sun's rays melted the wax which stuck the feathers to his arms, destroying his wings and causing him to plunge to his death. But maybe his flight, which was "no middle flight", to speak with Milton, was worth even death?
"The titanic artist was strong in his defiant belief that he could create men and, at the least, destroy Olympian gods; this he was able to do by virtue of his superior wisdom, which, to be sure, he must atone for by eternal suffering. The glorious power "to do" [das herrliche "Können", a reference to the root of the word Kunst, "art"], which is possessed by great genius, and for which even eternal suffering is not too high a price to pay--the artist's austere pride--is of the very essence of Aeschylean poetry [the tragedy Prometheus Bound is by Aeschylus]". (BT 9.)
Though Zeus ordained that Prometheus be forever bound to the Caucasus for his crime, he was eventually unbound by Hercules. Likewise, according to some early Christian traditions, even Satan would be redeemed by Jesus at his Second Coming. Hercules was a son of Zeus and a mortal woman, even as Jesus was supposed to be the son of God and a mortal woman.
"What distinguishes the Aryan conception is an exalted notion of active sin as the properly Promethean virtue". (ibid.)
Eve's vice, on the other hand, was her seducibility; her "sin" consisted in her being seduced--it was therefore a passive sin. And of course the female is not traditionally considered the "passive" member in the equation for nothing: I will invoke again the act in which the male gives her his seed.
In describing the "aspirant to the grand style", Nietzsche says:
"It [the aspirant's ambition] repels; such men of force are no longer loved--a desert spreads around them, a silence, a fear as in the presence of some great sacrilege [Frevel]..." (WP 842.)
In his speech Of War and Warriors, Zarathustra advises the "ugly"--those who do not possess negative (i.e., feminine) beauty--to wrap themselves in the sublime, "the cloak of the ugly". The sublime (das Erhabene: the exalted, the august, the haughty) is also mentioned in The Birth of Tragedy:
"The truth once seen, man is aware everywhere of the ghastly absurdity of existence, comprehends the symbolism of Ophelia's fate and the wisdom of the wood sprite Silenus: nausea invades him. Then, in this supreme jeopardy of the will, art, that sorceress expert in healing, approaches him; only she can turn his fits of nausea into imaginations with which it is possible to live. These are on the one hand the sublime, which subjugates terror by means of art; on the other hand the comic, which releases us, through art, from the tedium of absurdity." (BT 7.)
In The Birth of Tragedy, these "imaginations with which it is possible to live" take the form of Tragedy and Comedy, respectively. The tragic hero was a sublime figure, or perhaps an ugly figure wrapped in the cloak of the ugly, the sublime. Prometheus for instance--the hero of Aeschylus' play--was not a god; he was a Titan. Now consider this:
"As a moral deity Apollo demands self-control from his people and, in order to observe such self-control, a knowledge of self. And so we find that the aesthetic necessity of beauty is accompanied by the imperatives, 'Know thyself,' and 'Nothing too much!' Conversely, excess and hubris [Selbstüberhebung] come to be regarded as the hostile spirits of the non-Apollinian sphere, hence as properties of the pre-Apollinian era--the age of Titans--and the extra-Apollinian world, that is to say the world of the barbarians. It was because of his Titanic love of man that Prometheus had to be devoured by vultures". (BT 4.)
The Apollinian Greeks are here contrasted by Nietzsche with the Titans--the pre-Apollinian Greeks--and the barbarians--the non-Greeks. Now let us look at this passage:
"The teaching meden agan ["nothing in excess"] applies to men of overflowing strength--not to the mediocre. The enkrateia ["temperance"] and askesis ["ascetic exercise"] is only a stage toward the heights: the "golden nature" is higher.
[...]
Higher than 'thou shalt' is 'I will' (the heroes); higher than 'I will' stands: 'I am' (the gods of the Greeks). The barbarian gods express nothing of the pleasure of restraint--are neither simple nor frivolous nor moderate." (WP 940.)
The heroes, like the Titan Prometheus, are men of overflowing strength, like the barbarians. The Titans as well as the barbarians are fearsome. But the sublimeness of the hero--the ugly man who has wrapped himself in the cloak of the ugly--does not yet constitute the grand style:
"The grand style arises when the beautiful carries off the victory over the monstrous." (The Wanderer And His Shadow, section 96, entire.)
This same insight we see in Thus Spake Zarathustra. The speech “Of War and Warriors” falls squarely within Part I. But squarely within Part II, in the speech “Of the Sublime Ones”, the sublime returns, and is judged by Zarathustra:
"A sublime one saw I today, a solemn one, a penitent of the spirit: Oh, how my soul laughed at his ugliness!
With upraised breast, and like those who draw in their breath: thus did he stand, the sublime one, and in silence:
O'erhung with ugly truths, the spoil of his hunting, and rich in torn raiment; many thorns also hung on him--but I saw no rose."
Compare this to The Birth of Tragedy:
"The Apollinian need for beauty had to develop the Olympian hierarchy of joy by slow degrees from the original titanic hierarchy of terror, as roses are seen to break from a thorny thicket." (BT 3.)
Zarathustra continues:
"Not yet had he learned laughing and beauty. Gloomy did this hunter return from the forest of knowledge.
From the fight with wild beasts returned he home: but even yet a wild beast gazeth out of his seriousness--an unconquered wild beast!"
This suggests the "wild beast" in him is to be conquered. By the way, the phrases "thou shalt" and "I will" in WP 940 (see above) cannot fail to remind the true Nietzschean of the first speech of Part I, “Of the Three Metamorphoses”. There the "thou shalt" is the "thou shalt" of the camel, imposed upon it by the dragon; and the "I will" is the "I will" of the lion. Now see what Zarathustra says next:
"As a tiger doth he [the sublime one] ever stand, on the point of springing; but I do not like those strained souls; ungracious is my taste towards all those self-engrossed ones."
We should only think of tigons and ligers to understand how close the lion and the tiger are. And indeed, Wikipedia tells us:
"Rare reports have been made of tigresses mating with lions in the wild." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liger)
The grand style only arises when the metamorphosis of the lion into the child has come about:
"He hath subdued monsters, he hath solved enigmas. But he should also redeem his monsters and enigmas; into heavenly children should he transform them." (TSZ, ibid.)
This reminds me of the lion with the flock of doves, prophesied in the speech “Of Old and New Tables” (in Part III), and met by Zarathustra in “The Sign”, the last chapter of the book (in Part IV). Birds are of course a kind of "heavenly children". Now consider this:
"Elsewhere we read of heroes, like Siegfried in the Nordic legend, who understands this language of the birds as soon as they have overcome the dragon, and the symbolism in question may be easily understood from this. Victory over the dragon has, as its immediate consequence, the conquest of immortality, which is represented by some object, the approach to which is barred by the dragon, and the conquest of immortality implies, essentially, reintegration at the center of the human state, that is, at the point where communication is established with higher states of being. It is this communication that is represented by the understanding of the language of the birds." (René Guénon, 'The Language of the Birds', as quoted in Claudia Crawford's essay, “Nietzsche's Dionysian arts”.)
The conquest of immortality: the hero's becoming a god. The dragon is a "subdued monster" which has yet got to be "redeemed"...
"Fossil evidence and intensive biological analyses have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that birds are theropod dinosaurs." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird#Dinosaurs_and_the_origin_of_birds)
As you will probably know, the term "dinosaur" is derived from the Greek words deinos, "terrible", and saura, "lizard".
::
6. Pride and vanity.
Formerly we had two antitheses. I will recapitulate:
Masculine--------------------Feminine
Classical----------------------Modern
Strengthening---------------Weakening
Will to be terrible-----------Will to please
Positive ugliness------------Negative beauty
Phobos----------------------- Eros
Great passion----------------Small passion
Shame ("disgrace")----------Shame ("modesty")
Flow-------------------------- Ebb
Much force-------------------Little force
Aryan-------------------------Semitic
Prometheus (serpent)-------Eve
Giver--------------------------Receiver
Awe--------------------------- Contempt
Hubris------------------------ Sin
Active-------------------------Passive
I will introduce one new pair to this list: Pride and Vanity. Vanity is actually a lack of Pride. The vain (wo)man is primarily concerned with public approval, whereas the proud man is indifferent to that. "Vanity" is therefore a name for a relative lack of Pride; and "Pride", as normally used, is the name for a relative abundance of it.
"Male pride" is of course a standing expression; and so, perhaps, is "female vanity".
Pride-------------------------- Vanity
But I want to introduce a new opposition here. In fact, it has already been announced in the preceding section. Again, it concerns a quantitative difference. Yes, there is an even higher realm than the realm hitherto designated as the "masculine".
Consider again the passage about heroes like Siegfried quoted in section 5. Elsewhere, I quoted the exact same passage, and immediately continued:
In the Kabalistic Tree of Life, a glyph which on the microcosmic level represents the human body, the central sphere is called the Christ-center, and is the point where the lower and the higher self connect. The lower self is the ego, the conscious self; the higher self is the unconscious self, sometimes simply called "the Self". Avatars or incarnations of God, like Christ, Krishna, etc., are symbols of the Self[.]
The Christ is such a symbol of the Self; in fact, he "is" the Self of Western man, according to Jung (according to Miguel Serrano). But as I also said elsewhere;
That Jung thought Christ was a symbol of the Self does not mean he thought everything was right with it:
"In the empirical self, light and darkness form a paradoxical unity [cf. Ecce Homo, on TSZ, 3]. In the Christian concept, on the other hand, the archetype is hopelessly split into two irreconcilable halves[.]" (Jung, Aion, "Christ, a Symbol of the Self".)
These two halves are the Christ and the Antichrist.
This is not completely right; that is to say, those two halves are not simply the Christ and the Antichrist:
"For anyone who has a positive attitude towards Christianity the problem of the Antichrist is a hard nut to crack. It is nothing less than the counterstroke of the devil, provoked by God's Incarnation; for the devil attains his true stature as the adversary of Christ, and hence of God, only after the rise of Christianity, while as late as the Book of Job he was still one of God's sons and on familiar terms with Yahweh. Psychologically the case is clear, since the dogmatic figure of Christ is so sublime and spotless that everything else turns dark beside it. It is, in fact, so one-sidedly perfect that it demands a psychic complement to restore the balance. This inevitable opposition led very early to the doctrine of the two sons of God, of whom the elder was called Satanaël. The coming of the Antichrist is not just a prophetic prediction--it is an inexorable psychological law[.]" (Jung, ibid.)
Further on in this chapter, Jung writes:
"In the (Jewish-Christian?) apocalypse, the 'ascension of Isaiah,' we find, in the middle section, Isaiah's vision of the seven heavens through which he was rapt. First he saw Sammaël and his hosts, against whom a 'great battle' was raging in the firmament."
This is the battle described in Book VI of Paradise Lost. There the leading angel is of course called Satan.
The Dutch poet Adriaan Roland Holst once wrote:
"Had Lucifer been vain, he would never have fallen. Pride caused him to fall, until he split the nucleus of life, and arose in the second pride: the pride of death."
The last bit is probably a reference to the Angel of Death, Samael or Sammael, who, as Wikipedia tells me, is said to have "tempted Eve in the guise of the Serpent" (this corresponds to Book IX of Paradise Lost, where the angel tempting Eve is again Satan, of course).
Let us again invoke Blake's "Proverb of Hell": "The pride of the peacock is the glory of God." The peacock is the male of its species; the female is called "peahen". (Note that again the masculine version is called by the general name, as with "pride" and "vanity".) The peacock's tail--indeed, even the peahen's tail--can be terrifying:
"The female can also display her plumage to ward off female competition or danger to her young." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peacock)
And yet when a person is compared to a peacock, what is meant is that he is vain, not proud. Likewise, Satan in his "original glory" was still vain, not proud; when he got truly proud his pride caused him to fall. Notice how feminine Blake's Satan in His Original Glory looks!
The "glory" of the Christian God is vanity, not pride. As soon as Satan got proud, he was cast out of heaven: "God" could not stand a proud, masculine being beside "him"! Compare the following:
"The Ephesians would do well to hang themselves, every grown man of them, and leave the city to beardless lads; for they have cast out Hermodorus, the best man among them, saying, 'We will have none who is best among us; if there be any such, let him be so elsewhere and among others.'" (Heraclitus.)
Blake's God, however, was not the Christian God:
"But in the Book of Job, Milton's Messiah is call'd Satan.
For this history has been adopted by both parties.
It indeed appeared to Reason as if Desire was cast out; but the Devil's account is, that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.
This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter, or Desire, that Reason may have Ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he who dwells in flaming fire." (Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.)
Originally, Blake had written "no other than the Devil who dwells in flaming fire"; but he had expunged "the Devil", preferring to keep it implicit. What is implied is the the Jehovah of the Bible is the Devil, though, and that therefore the Devil is the true God. Compare Nietzsche:
"Let us remove supreme goodness from the concept of God: it is unworthy of a God. [...] No! God the supreme power--that suffices! Everything follows from it, 'the world' follows from it!" (The Will to Power, section 1037.)
As for the Jehovah (Yahweh) of the Bible: Jung writes the following about him.
"Perhaps we may risk the conjecture that problem of the Yahwistic God-image, which had been constellated in men's minds ever since the Book of Job, continued to be discussed in Gnostic circles and in syncretistic Judaism generally, all the more eagerly as the Christian answer to this question--namely the unanimous decision in favour of God's goodness--did not satisfy the conservative Jews. In this respect, therefore, it is significant that the doctrine of the two antithetical sons of God originated with the Jewish Christians living in Palestine. Inside Christianity itself the doctrine spread to the Bogomils and the Cathars; in Judaism it influenced religious speculation and found lasting expression in the two sides of the cabalistic Tree of the Sephiroth, which were named hesed (love) and din (justice)." (Jung, ibid.)
Actually, hesed and din are the names of two opposing Sephiroth ("spheres") on the Tree of Life; the two sides, both of which encompass three of such spheres, are actually called the Pillars of Mercy and of Severity, respectively.
I quoted Jung in saying "For anyone who has a positive attitude towards Christianity the problem of the Antichrist is a hard nut to crack." But for us Nietzscheans, who don't have positive attitude toward Christianity, the nut may seem easy to crack in the light of what I wrote elsewhere, where I wrote:
These two halves are the Christ and the Antichrist. Now the Church had a "solution" to this onesidedness:
"Although the exclusion of the power of evil was something the Christian consciousness was well aware of, all it lost in effect was an insubstantial shadow, for, through the doctrine of the privatio boni [privation of the good] first propounded by Origen, evil was characterized as a mere diminution of good and thus deprived of substance." (ibid.)
We see here that "evil" is regarded as a lack of "good", even as cold is a lack of heat. In this lies the key to our solution.
Good and evil are here regarded as poles. There are gradations: lesser and greater evils, that is, lesser and greater privations of the good. We Nietzscheans need only turn the poles around to effect a revaluation.
"[T]he Devil's account is, that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss." (Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.)
"Good", as opposed to "evil", is simply a euphemism for "weak". And we can easily see that weakness is a--relative--lack of strength. "Good" (weakness) is a privation of "evil" (strength). The Christ is not
the strong glare of light, but the soothing darkness (lack of light, privation of light). The Antichrist on the other hand is the strong glare of light:
"And verily, ye good and just! In you there is much to be laughed at, and especially your fear of what hath hitherto been called "the devil!"
So alien are ye in your souls to what is great, that to you the Superman would be frightful in his goodness!
And ye wise and knowing ones, ye would flee from the solar-glow of the wisdom in which the Superman joyfully batheth his nakedness!
Ye highest men who have come within my ken! this is my doubt of you, and my secret laughter: I suspect ye would call my Superman--a devil!" (TSZ, "Manly Prudence".)
If it was this simple, we could discard the whole Pillar of Mercy and be content to climb the Pillar of Severity. But it's not that simple. For Zarathustra says:
"As yet hath his [the sublime one's] knowledge not learned to smile, and to be without jealousy [compare the "envy" mentioned in Of War and Warriors]; as yet hath his gushing passion not become calm in beauty.
Verily, not in satiety shall his longing cease and disappear, but in beauty! Gracefulness [die Anmut, "charm"] belongeth to the munificence of the magnanimous.
His arm across his head: thus should the hero repose; thus should he also surmount his repose.
But precisely to the hero is beauty the hardest thing of all. Unattainable is beauty by all ardent wills.
A little more, a little less: precisely this is much here, it is the most here.
To stand with relaxed muscles and with unharnessed will: that is the hardest for all of you, ye sublime ones!
When power becometh gracious [gnädig, "merciful"] and descendeth into the visible--I call such condescension, beauty.
And from no one do I want beauty so much as from thee, thou powerful one: let thy goodness be thy last self-conquest.
All evil do I accredit to thee: therefore do I desire of thee the good.
Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings, who think themselves good because they have crippled paws!
The virtue of the pillar shalt thou strive after: more beautiful doth it ever become, and more graceful [zart, "tender, gentle"]--but internally harder and more sustaining--the higher it riseth.
Yea, thou sublime one, one day shalt thou also be beautiful, and hold up the mirror to thine own beauty.
Then will thy soul thrill with divine desires; and there will be adoration even in thy vanity!
For this is the secret of the soul: when the hero hath abandoned it, then only approacheth it in dreams--the super-hero." (TSZ, "The Sublime Ones".)
The last remark is a reference to Ariadne (the soul), who was abandoned by Theseus (the hero) and then approached by Dionysus (the super-hero (Über-Held)).
You will have noted the mention of vanity.
This is actually a description of the grand style. The pillar becomes ever more beautiful (on the outside), and ever harder (on the inside). It thus becomes more "severe" on the inside and more "merciful" on the outside. It is therefore a "synthesis" of the pillars of mercy and of severity. And indeed, there is a third pillar in the middle of the Tree of Life, called the Pillar of Equilibrium. Jung cites the following remark about Yahweh:
"God's left hand dashes to pieces; his right hand is glorious to save." (Jung, ibid.)
On the human body, the left arm corresponds to the Sephira din, also called geburah, "strength", which is the "katabolic Sephira", whereas the right arm corresponds to the Sephira hesed, "love", which is the "anabolic Sephira". Yahweh thus wields over both the "beautiful" (in the negative sense), the pleasing, and the "ugly"--the terrible. Now hear Heidegger's "definition" of the grand style:
"In contrast to classicism, the classical is nothing that can be immediately divined from a particular past period of art. It is instead a basic structure of Dasein, which itself first creates the conditions for any such period and must first open itself and devote itself to those conditions. But the fundamental condition is an equally original freedom with regard to the extreme opposites, chaos and law; not the mere subjection of chaos to a form, but that mastery which enables the primal wilderness of chaos and the primordiality of law to advance under the same yoke, invariably bound to one another with equal necessity. Such mastery is unconstrained disposition over that yoke, which is as equally removed from the paralysis of form in what is dogmatic and formalistic as from sheer rapturous tumult. Wherever unconstrained disposition over that yoke is an event's self-imposed law, there is the grand style[.]" (Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. I, chapter 17.)
I will analyse this passage in the next section.
::
7. The white bull and the tiger.
"A little more, a little less: precisely this is much here, it is the most here." (TSZ, "The Sublime Ones".)
Whereas the hero wills ever more, Zarathustra here says only a little more, or even a little less, is much and the most here. Moderation.
"To stand with relaxed muscles and with unharnessed will: that is the hardest for all of you, ye sublime ones!" (ibid.)
And therefore that which "ye" should strive for.
"When power becometh gracious [gnädig, "merciful"] and descendeth into the visible--I call such condescension, beauty." (ibid.)
When the invisible God descends into the sphere of Tiphareth, the Christ-center...
"And from no one do I want beauty so much as from thee, thou powerful one: let thy goodness be thy last self-conquest.
All evil do I accredit to thee: therefore do I desire of thee the good.
Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings, who think themselves good because they have crippled paws!" (ibid.)
'All ugliness do I accredit to thee: therefore do I desire of thee the beautiful.
Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings, who think themselves beautiful because they have atrophied organs of attack and defense!'
Now as for Heidegger.
"In contrast to classicism, the classical is nothing that can be immediately divined from a particular past period of art. It is instead a basic structure of Dasein, which itself first creates the conditions for any such period and must first open itself and devote itself to those conditions. But the fundamental condition is an equally original freedom with regard to the extreme opposites, chaos and law; not the mere subjection of chaos to a form, but that mastery which enables the primal wilderness of chaos and the primordiality of law to advance under the same yoke, invariably bound to one another with equal necessity. Such mastery is unconstrained disposition over that yoke, which is as equally removed from the paralysis of form in what is dogmatic and formalistic as from sheer rapturous tumult. Wherever unconstrained disposition over that yoke is an event's self-imposed law, there is the grand style".
[Heidegger, 'Nietzsche', Vol. I, chapter 17.]
The classical is a basic structure of Dasein. Dasein, which usually means "existence" in German, in Heidegger refers to the human being, which he conceives as a "being-there" (Da-sein).
Dasein first creates the conditions for any classical period of art (and thereby for any period of art as a
whole), and must open itself and devote itself to those conditions. So it must devote itself to what it has itself created.
The fundamental one among these conditions is a freedom which is equally original toward the extreme opposites, chaos and law. Chaos is not simply subjected to law (to a form), but this freedom is a mastery
"which enables the primal wilderness of chaos and the primordiality of law to advance under the same yoke". It thus subjects, or rather sub-jugates (literally), both chaos and law. This does not mean they are subjugated with force, though; they are enabled to advance together under the same yoke--almost as if they would do so voluntarily. Compare again "The Sublime Ones", where Zarathustra says:
"As the bull ought he [the sublime one] to do; and his happiness should smell of the earth, and not of contempt for the earth.
As a white bull would I like to see him, which, snorting and lowing, walketh before the plough-share: and his lowing should also laud all that is earthly!"
Note that this is the same sublime one who was previously compared to a tiger. The tiger represents chaos, the terrifying aspect of reality. Why should it willingly advance under a yoke?
In Hinduism, the steed of the goddess Durga is a tiger. "She is [...] considered the fiercer, demon-fighting form of Shiva's wife, goddess Parvati." (Wikipedia, "Durga".) Shiva's steed is a white bull. This
suggests the "tiger" is still relatively feminine (weak) when compared to the "white bull". Shiva, though a supremely masculine deity (he is worshipped as the lingam, a phallus symbol), has decidedly
androgynous characteristics. This is because he is a "master" (ishvara), who enables both the "masculine" (the terrible) and the "feminine" (the pleasing) to advance under the same yoke.
Heidegger continues:
"Such mastery is unconstrained disposition [Walten, "wielding"] over that yoke, which is as equally removed from the paralysis of form in what is dogmatic and formalistic as from sheer rapturous tumult
[Wagner]. Wherever unconstrained disposition over that yoke is an event's self-imposed law, there is the grand style".
It is self-imposed because it is the fundamental condition to which what had created it is itself devoted.
P.S.: The statement "Beauty is terror" is actually from The Secret History, by Donna Tartt--a good novel, though I like her second one, The Little Friend, much better--reading that was profoundly satisfying.
The statement "Every thing of power is a sight to behold" is really a rendition of a statement by Moody Lawless.
::
8. The way up and the way down.
In "Of the Sublime Ones", Zarathustra says:
"When power becometh gracious and descendeth into the visible--I call such condescension, beauty."
The word here translated as "gracious" is gnädig, "merciful" (compare "divine grace"). We should therefore think of the terrible, invisible God Yahweh here, who descended into the visible in the form of his avatar, Christ (note that avatara means "descent" in Sanskrit).
What I'm trying to say here is that the beauty of the powerful one does not consist in his ascending to an even greater height than positive ugliness, but in descending into the sphere of negative beauty. His will to descend there is terrible, though:
"Passion for power [Herrschsucht, "addiction to ruling"]: but who would call it passion, when the height longeth to stoop for power! Verily, nothing sick or diseased [Süchtiges] is there in such longing and descending!
That the lonesome height may not forever remain lonesome and self-sufficing; that the mountains may come to the valleys and the winds of the heights to the plains:
Oh, who could find the right prenomen and honouring name for such longing! 'Bestowing virtue'--thus did Zarathustra once name the unnamable." ("Of the Three Evils".)
And in his speech "Of the Bestowing Virtue", Zarathustra describes this longing thus:
"When your heart overfloweth broad and full like the river, a blessing and a danger to the lowlanders: there is the origin of your virtue."
An ab-undance that may quench the thirst of the lowlanders, but may also drown them (hence "a blessing and a danger"). This "loving one's will" (ibid.) is not a will to please: for it does not focus on what the receiver might want, but on what the giver wants: to give, even if it means to flood the receiver. Thus such "loving ones" are selfish in the good sense:
"[...] the wholesome, healthy selfishness, that springeth from the powerful soul:--
From the powerful soul, to which the high body appertaineth, the handsome, triumphing, refreshing body, around which everything becometh a mirror". ("Of the Three Evils".)
This good selfishness is not only contrasted with bad selfishness (the former wants to take in order to give; the latter wants to take in order to have); it is also contrasted with selflessness:
"With its words of good and bad doth such self-enjoyment shelter itself as with sacred groves; with the names of its happiness doth it banish from itself everything contemptible.
Away from itself doth it banish everything cowardly; it saith: 'Bad--that is cowardly!' Contemptible seem to it the ever-solicitous, the sighing, the complaining, and whoever pick up the most trifling
advantage. [Compare HATH 411! That section ties such concern with "trifling advantages" directly to the feminine.]
[...]
And spurious wisdom: so doth it call all the wit that slaves, and hoary-headed and weary ones affect; and especially all the cunning, spurious-witted, curious-witted foolishness of priests!
The spurious wise, however, all the priests, the world-weary, and those whose souls are of feminine and servile nature--oh, how hath their game all along abused selfishness!
And precisely that was to be virtue and was to be called virtue--to abuse selfishness! And 'selfless'--so did they wish themselves with good reason, all those world-weary cowards and cross-spiders!
But to all those cometh now the day, the change, the sword of judgment, the great noontide: then shall many things be revealed!
And he who proclaimeth the ego wholesome and holy, and selfishness blessed, verily, he, the prognosticator, speaketh also what he knoweth: 'Behold, it cometh, it is nigh, the great noontide!'
Thus spake Zarathustra." (ibid.)
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9. The crab and the pillar.
The powerful one's shame for his "goodwill" (cordiality) and intimacy is, like the negatively beautiful one's shame for her beauty, aidos, bashfulness. And this bashfulness is shyness, a form of fear. The negatively beautiful one, being beautiful due to the atrophy of her organs of attack and defense, shies away because she is afraid of being hurt; likewise, the powerful one hides his "goodwill" behind his
hardness, his ugliness, because he's afraid of being hurt in his soft spot. He is thus like Cancer in astrology: the Crab, who has an exo-skeleton, preserving his soft flesh inside his ugly shell.
"The eye looks vulgar
Inside its ugly shell.
Come out in the open
In all of your Brilliance."
(Jim Morrison, The Lords.)
Thus Zarathustra spurs the powerful one to overcome his weakness:
"And from no one do I want beauty so much as from thee, thou powerful one: let thy goodness be thy last self-conquest.
[...]
The virtue of the pillar shalt thou strive after: more beautiful doth it ever become, and more graceful--but internally harder and more sustaining--the higher it riseth." ("Of the Sublime Ones".)
The pillar is beautiful on the outside and hard on the inside--the converse of the Crab.
Visibility of happiness, and (psychological) nakedness, are terrifying because they suggest that the one who allows his happiness to become visible is strong enough to show his sensitive side.
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10. Shame and shamelessness.
In his Nachlass, in the only place he ever mentions aidos, as fas as I know, Nietzsche says:
"Aidos is the emotion [Regung] and shyness [Scheu; LEO translates this as "awe, dread, timidity"], not to [want to] offend gods, men, and eternal laws: that is, the instinct of reverence [Ehrfurcht] as customary with good [noble] men. A kind of revulsion at the offending of the honourable [Ehrwürdigen].
"The Greek aversion against immoderation [das Übermass], in the joyful i[nstinct] of hubris, the transgression [die Überschreitung] of one's own boundaries, is most noble [vornehm]--and paleo-aristocratic [altadelig]! The offending of aidos is a ghastly sight for those who are used to aidos." (Nachlass Spring-Summer 1883 7 [161].)
I contend that aidos, however noble it may be when it's become second nature, is at bottom shame for one's weakness.
In section 4, I wrote:
"[...] it is apparently "great", according to Zarathustra, to not be ashamed. Question: does this apply to both forms of shame, or only to aiskhyne? We shall look into this question later."
I will look into this question now. I say it applies only to aiskhyne. It is great (noble) to feel shame (aidos) at one's own weakness, as it is honest to do so. One should compare Nietzsche's meditations on the Greek word esthlos in GM I, 5. (Note: "honesty" is cognate with "honour".)
Now we can paraphrase Zarathustra (TSZ, "Of War and Warriors") as follows:
"Shame--that is the distinction [Vornehmheit] of the weakling. Let your distinction be shamelessness!"
The great should feel aidos for their relative weakness (e.g., their negative beauty), but no aiskhyne for their relative strength (e.g., their positive ugliness).
Sauwelios- Philosophical Supremacist
- Posts : 28
Join date : 2011-12-17
Age : 45
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