I've reached the end of Volume 1 of Jung's Zarathustra seminar. Seems the group spent 2 years covering almost all of Part 1 of the book, and then sped up substantially from there (though they didn't make it through the entire book due to the fucking Nazis). While this slow pace afforded me a chance to carefully reread Part 1, I didn't get much more out of Jung's lectures than what I laid out in writing about the prologue. In some ways, I think Jung was a wise man. For example, I can easily imagine his specific advice to patients improving their lives a lot more than Freud's clinical evaluations. A lot of this may just be because his theory is way simpler than Freud's. Basically he thinks that humans have both good and bad in them and they need to see and integrate both of these in order to form a real whole individual; it doesn't work to just ignore or repress the bad stuff. This is pretty sound advice. But it's hardly much of a theory. Today we would even call it common sense. This in itself might be a testament to Jung's wisdom -- one that, however, I don't need to read another 750 pages to appreciate. So I'm not going to read Volume 2. It's clear what Jung's theory is. It's clear what he thinks of TSZ. I don't foresee much of anything new for the effort. I'm moving on to Heidegger's lectures.
This means it's a good time to stop and summarize some ideas about TSZ Part 1. While I don't have anything approaching a theory of the book yet, I do think I have made at least some headway in understanding the philosophical problem at its core. This isn't due to any insight on the part of Jung, but mainly to the fact that I started reading Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche wrote BGE immediately after TSZ, and suggested in a letter to his friend Jacob Burckhardt that, "... it says that same thing as my Zarathustra, but differently, very differently." (Kaufmann preface to BGE) Although I've only made it through a couple of chapters, I've found them immensely helpful in interpreting the earlier book. BGE is a complicated and confusing text, filled with classic Nietzschean indirection and traps for the unwary. It's also a piece of cake compared to Zarathustra. While you can't ever claim that Nietzsche's typical aphoristic style (which he reverts to in BGE) truly constructs an argument, it certainly has a much clearer thread of development connecting one idea to the next. In addition, the book makes straightforward reference to other philosophers and particular philosophical problems, rather than wrapping these same issues in allegory.
Reading the first chapter of BGE entitled On The Prejudices of Philosophers gave me a much better sense of the world that Zarathustra inhabits. Ultimately, what we really lose with the infamous death of God we saw mentioned in the prologue is the presumed unity of the human soul or mind. God is above all an ordering and unifying principle. He is an example of, "The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians ... the faith in opposite values" (BGE, #2). God is the principle of moral evaluation, the presumed basis for the opposition of good to evil that the historical Zarathustra was the first to describe. God = Good. Once this principle no longer convinces us with its obviousness and self-evidence, we have to establish an order in and for ourselves. Unlike the book jacket version of existentialism (as a humanism) with which Nietzsche is sometimes associated, the problem here is not that we as sovereign individuals have to choose a new principle meaning for our life. The problem goes one level deeper -- who is around to do the choosing? We were, after all, made in God's image; his death is our own. In fact, Nietzsche's basic observation is that God (or Truth or Justice or whatever other Virtue you name) was always just a name for a certain type of hard-won unity of our self that we projected outside of ourselves as a metaphysical principle. The collapse of this principle then is not really a cause of some momentous new era, but actually just the effect of the collapse of the presumed-as-given unity of our self. God didn't just die, we murdered him. Though if you follow through the logic, this is actually a murder-suicide (separate incidents) with no killer or victim.
So far, I've mostly stated this idea in the opaque and poetic language of TSZ. BGE actually starts from the opposite perspective. The question there is less the death of God, the failure of this principle of unity, than how and why God and the Self were born to begin with. Here, Nietzsche explores the psychology that created these beliefs. Which is to say, he explores the creation of a unified psychology.
Assuming that nothing real is 'given' to us apart from our world of desires and passions, assuming that we cannot ascend or descend to any 'reality' other than the reality of our instincts (for thinking is merely an interrelation of these instincts, one to the other), may we not be allowed to perform an experiment and ask whether this 'given' also provides a sufficient explanation for the so-called mechanistic (or 'material') world? I do not mean the material world as a delusion, as 'appearance' or 'representation' (in the Berkeleian or Schopenhauerian sense), but rather as a world with the same level of reality that our emotion has - that is, as a more rudimentary form of the world of emotions, holding everything in a powerful unity, all the potential of the organic process to develop and differentiate (and spoil and weaken, too, of course), as a kind of instinctual life in which all the organic functions (self-regulation, adaptation, alimentation, elimination, metabolism) are synthetically linked to one another - as a preliminary form of life? (BGE #36, using the Marion Faber translation)
This profound aphorism posits (and note the emphasis on posits, experiments with, attempts) a 'given' state where there is no god, no self, and no ruling principle, but simply a tangle of multiple interrelated instincts or drives. This is the world of Zarathustra. Everything in it, even our own thought, has to be constructed and produced, and the principle of this construction is not unity and identification, but differentiation. Nietzsche here posits something remarkably like the body without organs.
While the positing of this unity may sound like it simply replaces God, I think there are two crucial differences. First, this unity is posited, not presumed. This is not a mere terminological difference. In fact, Nietzsche makes clear in the next paragraph of the aphorism that this supposition is actually commanded by a morality of parsimonious method.
In the end, we are not only allowed to perform such an experiment, we are commanded to do so by the conscience of our method. We must not assume that there are several sorts of causality until we have tested the possibility that one alone will suffice, tested it to its furthest limits (to the point of nonsense, if you'll allow me to say so). We cannot evade this morality of method today: it follows 'by definition', as a mathematician would say.
In other words, this method is not the only possible one, but it is the one we've been handed as our morality, which, as you'll recall, has been based on the presumption of unity. Nietzsche is overcoming our morality by means of it. Or you might say he's simply taking moralistic thinking to its own limit. Second, and relatedly, this hypothesized unity is not an actual unity but a potential one, one meant to do away with the need for positing any actual atomistic unities. The aphorism continues by considering each of the 'given' instincts or drives as little wills. But our methodological goal is precisely to avoid taking these 'little wills' as presumed unities that work just like the agency of the larger self/god that we've called into question. To do this, we have to posit them as differentiations or developments of one larger will that never actually exists in undifferentiated form.
The question is ultimately whether we really recognize that the will can effect things, whether we believe in the causality of the will: if we do (and to believe in this is basically to believe in causality itself), we must experiment to test hypothetically whether the causality of the will is the only causality. A 'will' can have an effect only upon another 'will', of course, and not upon 'matter' (not upon 'nerves', for example): one must dare to hypothesize, in short, that wherever 'effects' are identified, a will is having an effect upon another will and that all mechanical events, in so far as an energy is active in them, are really the energy of the will, the effect of the will.
Assuming, finally, that we could explain our entire instinctual life as the development and differentiation of one basic form of the will (namely the will to power, as my tenet would have it); assuming that one could derive all organic functions from this will to power and also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation and alimentation (it is all one problem), then we would have won the right to designate all effective energy unequivocally as: the will to power. The world as it is seen from the inside, the world defined and described by its 'intelligible character'*- would be simply 'will to power' and that alone.-
So the idea of the 'will to power' has nothing to do with a desire for power on the part of a pre-existing agent. Rather, the will to power is the thing that differentiates in order to produce an agent. As the most undifferentiated form of will, the will to power is like the egg from which all other will is derived, the ground zero of willing that really has no object apart from itself. The will to power can have no goal like survival or procreation because it comes before there is any unity to survive or procreate. This 'it' wants only the capacity, the potential, the power to will itself, which is just the power to differentiate, to value, to order, to command, in short to create the vector of change that defines the concept of will. We'll see next that Nietzsche devotes a lot of attention in BGE to the production of a will. My point right now is just that the "unity" of the will to power is specifically structured not to replace the unity of God or the Self, but to survive the very attack that Nietzsche is leveling against those concepts. This is MONISM=PLURALISM.
The hypothesis of the full BwO of the will as will to power may be a bit too abstract of a starting point though. A lot of the first chapter of BGE and the first part of Zarathustra revolve around setting up the problem of the will by deconstructing the presumed unity of willing subject that we usually take for granted. The simplest expression of this idea is Nietzsche's rejection of "soul atomism".
The first step must be to kill off that other and more ominous atomism that Christianity taught best and longest: the atomism of the soul. If you allow me, I would use this phrase to describe the belief that holds the soul to be something ineradicable, eternal, indivisible, a monad, an atom: science must cast out this belief! And confidentially, we do not need to get rid of 'the soul' itself nor do without one of our oldest, most venerable hypotheses, which the bungling naturalists tend to do, losing 'the soul' as soon as they've touched on it. But the way is clear for new and refined versions of the hypothesis about the soul; in future, concepts such as the 'mortal soul' and the 'soul as the multiplicity of the subject' and the 'soul as the social construct of drives and emotions' will claim their rightful place in science. (BGE #12)
This is an incredibly sophisticated statement of the no-self concept familiar to every buddhist. To quote my meditation teacher, what we discover in meditation is not that the self does not exist, but simply that the way we have a self is not the way we thought. It's not some little marble at the center of our existence; and it's only the seed at the center of the fruit if we understand that the seed is everything, as well as nothing without the soil, the sun, etc ... Nietzsche here is not merely deconstructive, but goes on to offer several hypotheses (emphasis on the several and the hypothetical) as to how the appearance of an atomistic self arises, hypotheses which we've seen lead in the direction of an undifferentiated but all embracing potential that any non-dualist would clearly identify as "awareness itself". This is a crucial point for Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Mahayana buddhism. If you say that everything is 'really' the will to power or the BwO or buddha-nature, you immediately need to explain why this is such a hard, rare, and counter-intuitive perspective to grasp. If there is no-self, why is there such a pervasive illusion of self?
Once we start smashing the soul atom, all kinds of unities we took for granted start coming apart. For example the self-evidentness of both I's in Descartes' famous formula:
... the philosopher must say to himself, 'If I analyze the process expressed by the proposition "I think", I get a series of audacious assertions that would be difficult if not impossible to prove; for example, that I am the one who is thinking, that there has to be a something doing the thinking, that thinking is an activity and an effect on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that an "I" exists, and finally, that we by now understand clearly what is designated as thinking - that I know what thinking is. (BGE, #16)
... a thought comes when 'it' wants to, and not when '!, want it to; so it is falsifying the facts to say that the subject 'I' is the condition of the predicate 'think'. There is thinking, [Kaufmann translates this is "It thinks"] but to assert that 'there' is the same thing as that famous old '!' is, to put it mildly, only an assumption, an hypothesis, and certainly not an 'immediate certainty'. And in the end 'there is thinking' is also going too far: even this 'there' contains an interpretation of the process and is not part of the process itself. People are concluding here according to grammatical habit: 'Thinking is an activity; for each activity there is someone who acts; therefore-.' (BGE, #17)
And once we've pulled apart the unity of the agent, we've obviously thrown into question the unity of the act as well, whether we're talking about the act of thinking or feeling or willing. So, in what is I think the most important aphorism I've come across for understanding TSZ so far, Nietzsche can go on to break down what we might call the phenomenology of willing.
As I see it, the act of willing is above all something complicated, something that has unity only as a word-and this common prejudice of using only one word has overridden the philosophers' caution (which was never all that great anyway). So let us be more cautious for once, let us be 'unphilosophical'. Let us say that in every act of willing there is first of all a multiplicity of feelings, namely the feeling of the condition we are moving away from and the feeling of the condition we are moving towards; the feeling of this 'away' and this 'towards'; and then a concomitant feeling in the muscles that, without our actually moving 'arms and legs', comes into play out of a kind of habit, whenever we 'will'. (BGE #19)
All willing involves a potential action, a vector of movement that sounds exactly like craving and aversion. As the aphorism goes on we see that this potential action for the whole organism is created by a competition of sorts amongst the various feelings and drives.
Second, just as we must recognize feeling, and indeed many kinds of feeling, as an ingredient of the will, so must we likewise recognize thinking: in every act of will there is a commanding thought, and we must not deceive ourselves that this thought can be separated off from 'willing', as if we would then have any will left over! Third, the will is not merely a complex of feelings and thoughts, it is above all an emotion, and in fact the emotion of command. What is called 'freedom of the will' is essentially the emotion of superiority felt towards the one who must obey: 'I am free, "he" must obey.'
...
A person who wills: this person is commanding a Something in himself that obeys, or that he thinks is obeying.
Willing is such a complex action that it is actually a sort of walking paradox where we both command and obey, simultaneously performing the role of subject and object. To characterize the way a multiplicity of drives are constructed into a unity of will, Nietzsche reaches for another constructed unity we are all familiar with: the state.
'Freedom of the will'-that is the word for that complex pleasurable condition experienced by the person willing who commands and simultaneously identifies himself with the one who executes the command-as such he can share in enjoying a triumph over resistance, while secretly judging that it was actually his will that overcame that resistance. Thus the person willing adds to his pleasurable feeling as commander the pleasurable feelings of the successful executing instrument, the serviceable 'underwill' or under-soul (our body after all is nothing but a social structure of many souls). L'effet c'est moi: what is occurring here occurs in every well-structured happy community where the ruling class identifies with the successes of the community as a whole. As we have said, every act of willing is simply a matter of commanding and obeying, based on a social structure of many 'souls'; fe)r this reason a philosopher should claim the right to comprehend willing from within the sphere of ethics: ethics, that is, understood as the theory of hierarchical relationships among which the phenomenon 'life' has its origins.
This politically loaded description of the process of willing is what takes on a metaphorical life of its own in the first part of TSZ. There, Nietzsche doesn't describe this whole deconstructive line of thought but simply assumes this political multiplicity of will as background and starting point. I guess in a sense Zarathustra begins where my reading (so far) of BGE stops. Because having deconstructed the unity of self and will, we are immediately faced with the concrete problem of what to do. How do we continue to operate once we see the political maelstrom within? This is really another variation on the problem of nihilism that arises in the aftermath of the death of God. By putting the issue in the context of the internal structure of the psyche though, we've recast the problem entirely. We're not talking anymore about the shallow question of whether or not God exists, or what other macro-meaningful concept might show up to plug this whole and replace our lost unity. What's important is not whether these concepts are 'real' or not, but what our need for them says about us. Nietzsche approaches concepts as diagnostic tools for understanding how the internal will is structured. Now we know that any of these concepts are merely the projection of an internal unity won through a messy political process. We know that the will to believe in them reveals a "ruling thought". So what do these ruling thoughts tell us about the state of the polis? And most importantly, how could we now ever trust any new ruling thought we might have as believable? How can we take seriously the fundamental importance of any new unity when we've seen how the sausage is made, and how it must always pretend to hide the manner of its creation? Our suspicion of ourself borders on paranoia.
With this problem in mind the speeches of Part 1 start to cohere. The "virtues" that figure so prominently in TSZ are just another name for the instincts or drives involved in the power struggle that produces a will. In fact, in chapter 5 (On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions) we explicitly learn that these virtues were originally just passions.
Once you had passions and named them evil. But now you have only your virtues: they grew out of your passions.
You set your highest goal at the heart of these passions, and then they became your virtues and passions of pleasure.
And whether you stemmed from the clan of the irascible or the lascivious or the fanatic or the vengeful:
Ultimately all your passions became virtues and all your devils became angels.
Once you had wild dogs in your cellar, but ultimately they transformed into birds and lovely singers.
Out of your poisons you brewed your balsam; your cow, melancholy, you milked – now you drink the sweet milk of its udder.
And now nothing evil grows anymore out of you, unless it is the evil that grows from the struggle among your virtues. (TSZ, 32)
The most powerful passions convinced us they were the highest truth and the greatest goal, and promptly made us forget that there was any struggle to begin with. But this struggle always was, and continues to be, a war that requires "warrior-peoples" whose "... very commanding [may] be an obeying" (TSZ, 42). The things we now hold to be self-evident virtues that guide and measure our actions were once passions which overcame us. They were commands from somewhere else. But instead of seeing them as effects, we retroactively posited them as goals and laws.
A tablet of the good hangs over every people. Observe, it is the tablet of their overcomings; observe, it is the voice of their will to power.
Praiseworthy to them is whatever they consider difficult; what is indispensable and difficult, is called good, and whatever stems from the highest need and still liberates, the rarest, the most difficult – that is praised as holy.
Whatever lets them rule and triumph and shine, to the dread and envy of their neighbor, that they consider as the high, the first, the measuring, the meaning of all things. (TSZ, 51)
Throughout chapter 15 (On the Thousand and One Goals) you can see that the important thing about these values is not that they give you power over your neighbor but that they differentiate you from him. Jung would undoubtedly call it "individuation" (though at the level of groups). But notice that these overcomings are not due to some sort of striving after a new goal on the part of an already existing individual. Maybe we can say that the goal defines the individual, and not vice versa. Or to put it in a more Nietzschean fashion: it's not that we ourselves overcome something, but that our self is overcome. The overcoming and the overhuman that Zarathustra keeps referring to do represent a sort of transcendence of the self, but only by means of descending into the multiplicity that lurks beneath it.
The main danger of this descent, this going-under, is nihilism. Zarathustra illustrates this danger again and again in various guises. There are those tired preachers of virtue who only want to put us to sleep, "lord of the virtues" (TSZ, 26). Those whose will to power is so weak that they want their 'I' to disappear into a 'world behind' even though this world is nothing but the invention of their tired will (chapter 3). And those whose only remaining power is to despise the body and the earth, which is Zarathustra's name for the BwO or will to power we were discussing before (chapter 4). All of these types illustrate the danger of, "what is bad and worst of all ... degeneration" (TSZ, 65). What is worst of all seems to be having an inner constitution that has reached a sort of weary equilibrium where all the drives are so evenly balanced that there is no potential difference left available in the system. It seems that differentiation can proceed to this paradoxical point where the only option that remains for the will to power is to will its own end. This seems to be what the Christian (or more generally religious) will represents for Nietzsche -- the suicide of the will that no longer has any power. Perhaps the ultimate modern symbol of this type of psychic constitution would be the men of the State (chapter 11).
State I call it, where all are drinkers of poison, the good and the bad; state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad; state, where the slow suicide of everyone is called – "life." (TSZ, 44)
But the danger of nihilism doesn't stop with the religious negation of life. I think one of the deeper points of Part 1 is that even the 'free' spirit, even those who understand Nietzsche's diagnosis of where this suicidal longing disguised as religious transcendence comes from, even Zarathustra himself, can become a victim of nihilism. In fact, there's a more explicit nihilism lurking in this view of the will as will to power. To see that everything we have believed in, and everything we could believe in, is nothing more than the temporary political triumph of a particular drive that overtakes other drives to form an 'us' -- this realization itself is apt to provoke a sort of nausea with the whole process. Zarathustra warns that the Way of the Creator (chapter 17) -- that is his way -- is a hard and lonely one.
But one day solitude will make you weary, one day your pride will cringe and your courage will gnash its teeth. One day you will cry "I am alone!"
One day will you will no longer see your high, and your low will be all too near; your sublimity itself will frighten you like a ghost. One day you will cry: "Everything is false!"
There are feelings that want to kill the lonely one; if they do not succeed, well, then they must die themselves! But are you capable of being a murderer? (TSZ, 55)
We see another version of this threat of 'higher nihilism', if you will, when Zarathustra meets the young man by the Tree on the Mountainside (chapter 8). Zarathustra obviously shares an affinity with this character, who is ashamed to admit that all his spiritual striving is at bottom merely envy of Zarathustra. While there's a sort of noble honesty in this assessment, the same nobility that leads us to critique all differentiated beliefs can itself become an impediment to tapping that undifferentiated source of all power to create. As Zarathustra warns his young friend (and perhaps warns himself?):
Yes, I know your danger. But by my love and hope I beseech you: do not throw away your love and hope!
You still feel noble, and the others who grudge you and give you the evil eye, they still feel your nobility too. Know that a noble person stands in everyone's way.
A noble person also stands in the way of the good: and even when they call him a good man, they do so in order to get rid of him.
The noble person wants to create new things and a new virtue. The good person wants old things, and for old things to be preserved.
But it is not the danger of the noble one that he will become a good person, but a churl, a mocker, an annihilator.
Oh, I knew noble people who lost their highest hope. And then they slandered all high hopes.
Then they lived churlishly in brief pleasures, scarcely casting their goals beyond the day.
'Spirit is lust too' – so they spoke. Then the wings of their spirit broke, and now it crawls around and soils what it gnaws.
Once they thought of becoming heroes: now they are libertines. To them the hero is grief and ghastliness.
But by my love and hope I beseech you: do not throw away the hero in your soul! Hold holy your highest hope!" – (TSZ, 38)
Here we see a noble and overt nihilism contrasted with the sort of pious disguised nihilism described earlier. While this may be a higher or more advanced form of the disease, it seems to lead to the same end in either case -- the suicide of hope, its drowning in a sea of indifference.
Finally, I think the picture I'm developing here helps us understand the most opaque chapter in Part 1 -- On the Pale Criminal (chapter 6). Jung rightly pointed out that there is something odd about this chapter. His understood it as Nietzsche subconsciously pointing to the criminal element in all of us, including in himself. I guess in a sense this is right, since Nietzsche never exempts his own ideas from his critiques, and since it's clear that the criminal (and his judge) is really nothing but the victim (or potential victim) of the internal war of the 'virtues' we've been talking about.
What is this human being? A pile of illnesses that reach out into the world through his spirit: there they seek their prey.
What is this human being? A ball of wild snakes that seldom have peace from each other – so they go forth for themselves and seek prey in the world.
Behold this poor body! What it suffered and craved this poor soul interpreted for itself – it interpreted it as murderous lust and greed for the bliss of the knife.
Whoever grows ill now is befallen by the evil that is evil now; he wants to hurt with that which makes him hurt. But there have been other ages and another evil and good. (TSZ, 34)
But Jung never pauses to ask himself the obvious question: what was the pale criminal's crime? We know why the criminal is pale. He suffered from madness both before and after the deed. Madness before, because he was only driven to his deed by his desire to stop suffering, a desire that overcame him but at the same time hid itself by convincing him it was merely a desire to rob. Madness after, because he let the particular instinct victorious in this one battle decide the whole war, and so let his deed define him. The pale criminal is pale because he is incapable of becoming equal to the deed that has overtaken him. His greatest strength lies only in his ability to see this incapacity.
Behold, the pale criminal has nodded: from his eyes speaks the great contempt.
"My ego is something that shall be overcome: my ego is to me the great contempt for mankind," so speak these eyes.
That he condemned himself was his highest moment: do not allow the sublime one to return to his baseness!
There is no redemption for one who suffers so from himself, unless it were the quick death. (TSZ, 32)
I think the pale criminal murdered God. As I said at the outset, it's really an human-all-too-human murder-suicide, since there never was a God to begin with. But this is the danger we confront when we reach the point of applying Nietzsche's perspectivist theory of the will to power to ourselves. What are we doing here, now, as philosophers, if not being overcome by some need to have it all make sense? Not the same sense that it has made for everyone else, but to have it make our own sense. But this need is entirely partial (in several senses of that term). It's a unique and momentary combination of instincts that we've seen is an utterly unreliable guide to the 'truth'. Our highest thoughts come from below, and we don't even understand them. And yet somehow the Overhuman is supposed to save us? We'll see what happens next time in Part 2!
