Nietzsche – Latter Day Lotus

Why did Nietzsche go insane?

Many scholars take as a matter of course that Nietzsche’s descent into madness was completely incidental and physiological. No one will really ever know all the details they would need to give an account that would satisfy a clinician. All that is to say–I presume no more than the white scholars do in on my own stipulation that the author of the European Lotus Sutra went mad as a result of the same implosion of his own philosophy; he casually in his unpublished Will to Power notebooks admits that he was still a nihilist when we wrote it. And this isn’t just a case of ordinary irony or hypocrisy, writing his spiritual polemic against nihilism while still a nihilist; but so much more subtly and insanely, since it was the very project of religious affirmation that invited his scathe for failure to do just this. The whole point of his work and his rage is that ‘merely getting it’ is not enough; you have to actually believe in order to have the authority to preach. Nietzsche went through darkness at noon at the end of his life, because he wasn’t in fact a prophet, a holy man; he just wanted to be admired as the brilliant artist he was. A forgivable vanity for someone of his artistic stature, but not of the (ostensibly) spiritual mission toward which he directed it, as indeed he claimed all true art and philosophy could only ever be. He never confronted the fact of his own anger, which he so brilliantly and acutely dissected in others; he was still angry about living in a world that gave the spoils of his game to manifest inferiors. His emotional, and likely sexual frustration got the best of him. He never wanted the job; he could not forgive the society that put him in a position of having to work outside of his vocation–the resentment borne of which, one might add, that begot all revolutionary energy whose hubris and self-defeating self-service he most cannily sniffed out. He wasn’t actually* Jesus, who, thorny as his spiritual legacy has been, was indeed willing to go down with the ship for the sake of his ministry, and therein transformed the world in unfathomable ways. Nietzsche was in fact, and knew he was, just that—a brilliant artist. Like, top few of all time, brilliant. And he couldn’t even get laid or a good job. He wasn’t really a spiritualist; he was a philosopher, and the philosopher is close to the artist, but has only himself for a character (Novalis). Ultimately, the joke was on him; his destiny, his role as an artist, was a de facto illustration of the failure of the Apollonian, of Christianity, of the West—the idea that the correct opinion, and worldly cultivation, can save us from savagery and spiritual death. No matter how brilliant you are, you will just be a more a labyrinthine, distracting, beautiful ornament over the same hideous core of nihilism and narcissism. This is what Nietzsche never grasped about Jesus, that he wasn’t a character in one his storybooks, a construct made for church and state politicians; he was a real man who did real things, put everything on the line for his beliefs and followed through on the sacrifice, and had no desire, or too much wisdom, to write anything down, or be proven the smartest and rightest after all in the courts of Europe or University departments. There is a threshold that cannot be crossed with just learning and brilliance, and Nietzsche misidentified it with the (oversimplified) allegation of the passivity of Christianity. It is the idea of wariness of gnosis advancing so far beyond one’s spiritual station, which itself can only be elevated through hard work, which cannot be conducted in the comfort and safety of one’s study.

“And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow.”

—G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I will state for the record, if it wasn’t obvious, that Nietzsche was twenty times the philosopher GKC was; and yet that is the whole point–for all his superior sophistication, Nietzsche was by his own admission, still a nihilist; while Chesterton the mere journalist committed to faith and caught all of the affronts to common sense that the Nietzschean heresies mounted, even if he lacked the truly adequate ability to defrock them at the metaphysical level.

Nietzsche said God is dead. Does that include Islam?

“God is dead” was not a metaphysical pronouncement: Nietzsche was simply saying that fundamentally, Europe did not believe in the inherited and established religion anymore. The entire socio-political order was reconciled to the spiritual needs and customs of the people through a false mechanism, no longer functional, like using superglue in lieu of proper construction materials for a joint in the hardware. This situation, he claimed, quite presciently, even prophetically, could not be sustainable, and would eventually yield a new birth of savagery. Islam is a different civilization than Europe, and Nietzsche was concerned primarily with the development and fate of Europe, ‘the West’, but I seem to recall him calling the Semites “strong races” in the W2P notebooks and further noting, as have others then and since, that, in specific contrast, the Islamic world did on the whole still believe; which did not particularly endear it to him though either, because he saw it as similarly dependent on the “morality” endemic to Levantine monotheism. The unique situation of the “Last Man,” that followed the survival of “morality” amid the discontinuity of belief in the superstructure that it supports, was a European problem, and it was Europe that had conquered the world not only politically and militarily but spiritually as well. Non-European societies had the exigent realities of dealing with this rapidly consolidating New World Order foisted upon them; and despite often agonizing clashes with the ancestral religion, the key, fatal premise had still been forcibly admitted.

What is the “Last Man?”

One of Nietzsche’s most misunderstood and easily caricatured ideas

So much bullshit has been spewn in the past century specifically regarding future-predicting, that it can be difficult even to take an idea like this seriously. The prophetic legitimacy of Nietzsche, as against the countless pretenders, is a broad, separate subject, but suffice it to note that Nietzsche describes a steamroll that had already been set in motion, that he was simply the first to observe. The true philosopher is the opposite of the normal person: unfathomably attuned to reality at the level of the cosmos, and (usually) unimaginably removed from it, therefore, at the level of everyday life. Nietzsche’s awkwardness, his double-exile alienated him from his peers but allowed him to snuff out at the literary, granular level what the new world order had coming to it. Some mystical quantum shift occurred in Europe in the late nineteenth century, which did not really hit America–where the more religious and intrepid of Europe’s lower and middle classes had naturally concentrated themselves in fellow expedition–until 1968.

The generation that fought WWI in Europe was comparable to the American generation that was drafted in Vietnam: all of a sudden a generation even whose less privileged classes grew up fundamentally in a different reality, different crucible–no crucible–than any other generation of human beings on earth–with the quasi-exception of certain aristocrats, who at least in theory had additional martial and civic standards to live up to in natural intersection with their privilege. All of a sudden there came a generation that thought this was normal–streetlights and food surplus and jobs to make useless trinkets and no barbarians ready to strike and torture and enslave any moment the local guard became soft. The old industrial economy was savagely indifferent, but a critical mass of insulation had been hit: people thought insulation was the natural condition. Human nature had not changed, but the economic-political order changed the game from one thing to another. For one sizable and powerful minority, usually associated with the ‘bourgeoisie’, the Promethean (or post-Lapsarian) gauntlet was not pain and toil, but boredom. Schopenhauer said the poor suffer from pain; the rich suffer from boredom, and the rich have it worse.

But equally significant from all sides is that for everyone else, the toil had changed from one kind–possessed of some inherent dignity, and a close tie to the land, whether still strictly agricultural or not–to another, just as grueling, but now undignified, and worse–also boring! And above all, these people had not ‘turned the corner’–they didn’t have a life of stuff to be bought off with, they had no practical maneuverability to speak of with respect to their life condition–they were still in the bondage Adam left them in.

And then comes the colossal earthquake of the First World War. The Great War is one of those very rare truly ‘mystical’ historical events, like the French Revolution, or even the financial crisis of ’08, when the more you study it and ‘understand’ it, see it from all sides, the less sense it makes; the more petty and vicious and selfish the behavior, the more necessary, unalterable, divinely willed it proves itself to be.

The generation that fought World War I was made of the soft, not really believing, pseudo-skeptic insulated suburban type p*&#s–in a word, guys like me. What they lacked in decadence and waned sense of patriotism vis-a-vis their American successors in Vietnam was compensated for by the crudeness of the clash with the ruling class they served. The War was the last stand of the Old Order, who, like anyone at the end of a great reign, can think of nothing but to double-down on just the things that have become most barbarically out of step with the times and welcome they’ve overstayed. Bismarck succeeded in weaving a labyrinth of power strings that only he could wield, and its inertia outweighed any substantive concerns of state by any party involved, who did not even really think it impolitic to put their throne before the people they governed as a matter of course. It made no difference whether on behalf of flatly imperial subjects such as the countless minorities of Austria-Hungry or the people of the deeply nationalistic Prussia–the concept, as articulated in France, that a ho stops being a ho because her pimp decided to call her a “citizen” instead of a “subject” had not sunk in even at a P.R. level.

In other words by no real account was this a “people’s” war, a heroic struggle against a barbarian and fear itself, the presence of a real cause and enemy to cut the fat out of the political bullshit that swells in coordinating a whole population’s efforts. The coldness of the sovereign indifference coupled with official incompetence before the new military reality: massive uptick in firepower, virtually none at all in mobility. No war had been so simultaneously savage as unromantic: the threat of real enslavement usually at least meant the possibility of real valor. But this war quickly became a cold calculation, a game of chicken about territory and resources; and not over survival and freedom, but footing the bill for the comet-sized hole in the ground in financial and political capital it had created. The fallout of this devastation determined virtually the entirety of the twentieth century’s course of events, and is therefore the indirect catalyst of Nietzsche’s prophesized apocalypse.

But has this to do with the Last Man?

The purpose of spirituality is to rise above the the status of the animals qua something, anything, other than the prophylactic flight from fear, from instinct. Western spirituality had advocated Greek and Abrahamic ideas about how to do this—in various forms, either to achieve a transcendent union with some body which is wholly other, or to escape our animality within this very body, by overpowering it, reaching to the universal checkpoint of Reason, acquiring the power to operate based on only the highest stratum of consciousness nature has provided, and jettisoning all the lower, reptilian brain impulses beneath it. Both however called for a rejection, a slander of the material world and the natural instincts, the inevitable world humans create prior to and independent of religious imposition; which Nietzsche believed already gave up the jig and rendered a true spirituality impossible. Only one which accommodated the full reality of what we are, found a way to sacralize it, could be worthy of the name; and only such a one could provide the means to real spiritual power, the will to confront fear rather than escape from it.

The Last Man refers to the general age of decadence, Phariseeism, pseudo-skepticism—but much more specifically, it refers to the man who really believes that satiation—insulation from fearful stimuli, rather than the actual triumph over fear itself—is an adequate terminus for the philosopher’s project, that he is the most evolved and cultivated man in history, who lives under an order of compassion and decency previously unimaginable. The fact is, this is the worship of technological means—the power to insulate ourselves, not of transcendence; it is a lifetime supply of fish in lieu of the perennial effort to learn the practice and the pedagogy of fishing, so as to teach the next generation. The Last Man still lives in the jungle—in fear—but has practically forgotten the problem with it, because the short term troubles that make it insufferable have been conquered with means, rather than spirituality; human intellect has simply devised a new weapon through its power of reason and analysis than the ones it had when it first left the literal jungle, but has therein stopped even trying to leave it once and for all, confident that it can best any predator.

The Last Man is still an animal in the jungle, except now is not even tough; he has not learned the discipline and skills that at least and even a distinguished animal teaches its young. If he ever got squeezed he would transform into a monster instantaneously; he has nothing to reach to in his hour of need, and now not even the ability to stand his ground. And what’s worse—he has stopped trying, he does not even attempt to become something else any more. The odd thing is, the totalitarianism of the twentieth century, often seen to lean on Nietzsche for intellectual justification, represents the absolute apotheosis of the specter he prophesied against: the idea that merely being smarter, better organized, more *rational, more technologically sophisticated than the animals qualified as an autonomous spiritual elevation above them. Spirituality requires courage, and the Last Man seeks not to establish a foundation for courage but the obviation of its need. Nietzsche is sloppily contemptuous of any “common” virtue like dignity, but the whole point is that it is dignity, not intelligence and material sophistication per se, that separates us from the animals. A spiritualist is required to believe we were ‘better’ than the animals for this faculty even before we had any fabricated weapons, otherwise the jig has already been forfeited. In the age of the Last Man the heights of bestial savagery were scaled not in defiance of, but in service to the nominal spirituality of the day, the “cause” greater than any individual which the people were expected to be prepared to sacrifice themselves for, the final victory of the Reich, or the proletariat. What separates us from the animals is not intelligence—which is given freely—but dignity; which often requires hard work, and courage; exertions unlikely to be afforded if their intrinsic value is obscured.