On The Underground Man and The Grand Inquisitor

Dostoevsky states in The Underground Man, that man’s worst defect is perpetual immorality because it is irrational.  This could be interpreted to mean that man would be perfect if only he’d stop being irrational and immoral.  But I think a more meaningful interpretation is that man’s stumbling block is himself.  Our own nature is our living strength and fatal flaw, simultaneously. 

Parallels between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky strike me as odd because I can’t relate to Nietzsche, but I resonate strongly with Dostoevsky.  If I were at a party with them, I’d probably exchange awkward pleasantries with Nietzsche, then go stalk Dostoevsky all night long.  Something they have in common is that they speak through angsty, rebellious, prophetic protagonists in their writings.  Yet Nietzsche seems unintelligible and abrasive while Dostoevsky seems engaging and insightful.  Another commonality is that they both address a strong/weak, master/slave dynamic in their writings.  Most likely it is the manner in which they interpret these themes that affects my reception of them.  Whatever difficult, bitter topic they cover, their personalities impact their ideas.  Nietzsche clearly despises others, but Dostoevsky appreciates the irony and forgives.  It’s hard to relate to someone who’s cruel and easy to relate to someone who laughs.   I wonder what Nietzsche would think of Dostoevsky.  How would he peg him?  Maybe he would seek to explain his ideas and gain a peer relationship.  Or maybe he’d reject Dostoevsky as part of the herd.

Taking a theological detour in The Grand Inquisitor; the Cardinal said that to ask for a miracle is to lose faith in God, but to reject a miracle is to reject God.  That’s bad theology.  I realize Jesus quoted a section in the Bible where we’re instructed not to test God, but there are at least two sections where we’re invited to test God.  One is in Isaiah, when a king is on the brink of a war he can’t win.  He’s told to ask for some wondrous sign of God’s faithfulness (Isaiah 7:11) but he doesn’t ask, because he doesn’t trust God to carry him through the war.  That conclusion might seem like inference, but it’s evidenced by the king going to a neighboring ruler to ask for help instead.  The second place we’re invited to test God is in Psalms when the songwriter says to taste and see that the Lord is good.  The songwriter wants us to tell for ourselves and not take his word for it.  In general, testing is not opposite to faith (Romans 12:1-2, 1 Thessalonians 5:21).  My apologies, I keep coming back to theology in my commentaries—I just believe emphatically that if scripture is going to be mentioned and interpreted, then it should be interpreted accurately.       

Returning to a broader aspect of philosophy, I wanted to address the ethics of the Cardinal’s justification for the Catholic church’s rituals and regulations.  In short, he is not justified.  From an existentialist point of view, he’s unjustified because he’s usurping the individual responsibility of each “weak” congregant by smothering his or her ability to choose.  It’s a burden for every person.  Giving the burden to another person doesn’t absolve an individual of responsibility, it just changes the question to, “why did you trust this person?”  Every person does need a master.  Even non-religious people take their identities from a preferred, shared guiding mark or type (ex. ethnic, sport, interest affiliations).  Every person is a follower/subscriber, even if they don’t call themselves a slave.  Everyone seeks a master, but each person chooses their master freely.  The need for a master is precisely why the Cardinal was wrong to set himself up as the benefactor of the weak masses.  As a believing man, he should have known that every Christian ought to choose Christ as master (the whole “Lord” thing, and all).  It was poor caretaking to take over Christ’s place in the congregants’ hearts and to neglect to strengthen them in order to make that choice.  It was wrong for him to do that. 

On The Will to Power and other Nietzschean Essays

As odd as it is, I want to read more Nietzsche.  I found several interesting excerpts when I was researching for my group’s presentation, which made me want to further investigate his work. The excerpts are inflammatory and confusing; they make me feel like I don’t understand Nietzsche at all even after reading every selection in our text.  I want to pin Nietzsche down and figure him out.  What I found in The Will to Power suggests that he would approve of genocide, as he calls the will to power: “the great cultivating idea: the races that cannot bear it stand condemned; those who find it the greatest benefit are chosen to rule… I want to teach the idea that gives many the right to erase themselves…” section 1053 & 1056.  Yet Nietzsche also specified that those who suspect him of Darwinism are educated morons (Ecce Homo, 41).  He’s not simple, which is irritating as a logician but intriguing as an artist.  In Ecce Homo Nietzsche talks about finding the Overman in the Machiavellian Prince, which I understand to be controversial even though I don’t remember the details of Machiavelli’s propositions.  It’s tantalizing because Nietzsche’s meaning of the Overman wasn’t laid out in the text selections.  I want to read more so I can iron out the apparent inconsistencies and see how Nietzsche defines his terms. 

Another thing I'm stuck on is why Nietzsche hates God and religion.  I know there are legitimate reasons to hate God and religion, but I don’t understand Nietzsche’s reasons or even his concept of God.  In the “Error of Freewill” in Twilight of the Idols, he says that if “we deny God, we deny the responsibility that originates from God: and thereby we redeem the world.”  First of all, I have a problem with the idea that if I deny something then it will go away.  Secondly, if negation or denial did work for some things, I think God would be too big and powerful to be subject to our negation.  Aside from that, Nietzsche’s statement has all sorts of interesting implications.  He says that the world needs us to redeem ourselves from our responsibility.  He seems to say that responsibility condemns us and we have the power to save ourselves by denying God.  This confused me at first because I was thinking of redemption, responsibility, and God in the Christian way—a personal God, self-indictment by trespassing laws, the need for a savior.  But then I remembered that Nietzsche doesn’t talk about God as a personal being.  He sees God as a figment of our consciousness.  There is no real trespassing, the only self-indictment is breaking our own self-made rules. So we’re condemning ourselves with a figment of our self-created morality and we can knock it off if we so choose, thereby redeeming ourselves.    

But if responsibility and redemption really are that arbitrary, I don’t see why I can’t just as easily deny Nietzsche as Nietzsche can deny God.  He says that I need to reconcile to the idea of eternal recurrence by accepting the will to power, but I’m able to deny that idea as well as that method of acceptance.  If the universe is a circle, then the things that make him determinist are the same things that make me libertarian.  Essentially, realizing the eternal recurrence “means” nothing—Nietzsche cannot indicate an alternative.  The moralists HAVE TO try to force their custom on others, the noblemen HAVE TO resist descending into the rabble, the utilitarians HAVE TO cling to their figment of God.  I assume that if Nietzsche tells me something about how the world works, then there is a purpose in his telling.  But I don’t see a change to make or “should” to follow.   I don’t see the point in revealing this underworld, the ring of eternal recurrence.  Why should I will to power?  If the universe really is a circle of non-progressing mutation, so what?  More reading!

On a Variety of Nietzsche's Essays

Plot twist: in this entry I will search out points of agreement instead of points of contention. Taking a break from being a bossy know-it-all today.

I like Nietzsche’s narrative format in The Gay Science. I agree that story is a good way to get a philosophical point across. Story is great because it naturally and expressively creates all sorts of impressions about the author. For instance, authors generally identify with their protagonist. In the case of The Gay Science, that would mean that Nietzsche identifies with the Madman, which is telling and sadly ironic due to his own mysterious mental breakdown at the premature end of his life. 

I appreciated that the Madman offered many word pictures about the impossibility of killing God. He compared murdering God to "drinking up the sea," "wiping away the horizon with a sponge," and "unchaining the earth from the sun." Although, I suppose Nietzsche meant it sarcastically. Most likely he thought that God was not all-powerful to begin with, so there would be nothing impossible about murdering God.

Another telling aspect of Nietzsche’s narrative was when the Madman talked about God decomposing. Decomposition an organic function; so basically, God is considered to be on the level of organisms--like people. I'd venture that Nietzsche further meant that God is below man, because he seems to describe God as a construct of man's own design, like a Frankenstein's monster in a castle on a cloud.

Thus Spake Zarathustra is another of Nietzsche's essays which is similar to The Gay Science in that he speaks his mind through a fictitious, unappreciated prophet. Zarathustra talks about the meaning of the earth, how to be faithful to be the earth, and how to sin against the earth. He talks about how the greatest wrong a person can commit is to will against the meaning of the world. I sympathize with this principle even though I disagree in with the particulars. I think it's important to order my life in accordance with the meaning of life (not that I do that well, or consistently, but I digress).

The passages about stars were evocative. They’re rather pretty, stirring. Zarathustra riddles, “I say unto you: one must still have chaos in himself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” The phrase “I say unto you,” is reminiscent of Jesus' teachings in the New Testament. Upon hearing this initially, I didn’t see why having chaos inside or giving birth to a star would be good things, but they made more sense after the description of the Last Man. Zarathustra said that the Last Man asks what love, creation, longing, and stars are, then blinks. The Last Man is clueless and passive towards anything resembling adventure, curiosity, and passion. In that way, I think that to be a Last Man is to be dead to humanity. A person cannot qualify as a whole or complete person without a capacity for wonder.

I also agree with the idea of working while there’s still time and resources. Zarathustra eludes to this principle when he talks about how the “time has come for man to set himself a goal,” now, before conditions become too poor to work.

My final points of agreement are that destroying passion and craving is merely a preventative measure (and a poor one at that), and that virtue often involves a quest for personal change and that often it involves conforming to the image of something or someone else. After that, it’s all disagreement. I’m tempted to rewrite this entire post and say what I really think about Nietzsche’s ideas, but that’s the nature of trying something new, isn’t it? Maybe this experiment is quashing my true impulse, or maybe I'm allowing myself to the possibility of learning from differences. I'll let you know how it goes.

On From Rationalism to Existentialism

First thing on my agenda for this entry is a rant about original intent.   As time goes on, we in class have less and less insight into the original intent of the authors.  We keep defining terms and answering questions based off of our own ideas instead of looking for the ways the authors answer them.  I’m not saying personal opinions are invalid.  It’s just frustrating to spend class listening to personal opinions before we have even established what the author is trying to say.  A prime example is Kierkegaard’s three life spheres and what he means by an aesthetic, ethical, or religious mode of life.  He defines an aesthete as someone whose PRINCIPLES are immediate gratification and avoidance of boredom.   Although we touched on the correct definition in class, we kept reverting to “immorality” as the definition of the aesthetic life, which is not at all accurate.  We also kept working off of a bad understanding of Kierkegaard’s meaning of the ethical sphere.  Ethical life for Kierkegaard wasn’t conformity to traditions, conservatism, and community service.  It was finding absolute truth and applying that universal reasoning to any given circumstance.  It had to do with endurance and commitment to what one thinks is right, not blending in with the crowd.  The religious sphere fared no better, as we kept reverting to the popular understanding of religious life instead of Kierkegaard’s meaning.  When he talks about religion as a sphere of life, he means being confronted by God and being ever-conscious of one’s own sin and guilt.  I disagree with Kierkegaard on at least two points, but I have to get to the end of my rant before I get to my objections.  Okay go:

Pop-culture Christianity in the 1800’s is pop-culture Christianity in the 2000’s.  The reason Kierkegaard can talk about truth in paradox and relating personally to truth is because he REJECTS the attempt to put God in a box and rationalize him, as pop-culture Christianity loves to do, regardless of era.  The reason I point this out is because there was this idea during discussion that Kierkegaard was advocating cookie-cutter Just Submit Christianity, which diametrically contradicts his position.  His refusal to match the church to the New Testament was the entire point of one of our readings.  Jesus, the Gospel, and the New Testament are not what the church systemizes and rationalizes them to be, they are what they are—a hard teaching which no one can accept (John 6:60).  To Kierkegaard, there is no reasoning that can make Christianity’s doctrine make sense. 

Admittedly, I have had rare experiences with Christianity, so I can’t expect people at large to relate to Christianity the way I do.  I acknowledge that even after one has encountered the true Christ, it’s nigh impossible to follow him anyway.  But I can’t take the idea that nonreligious people believe that Christianity is the sum of offensive pop-culture Christianity.  It simply isn’t true. 

Now that I’ve had my rant out, I turn to my two (minimum) objections.  Firstly, I object to Kierkegaard’s idea that the highest sphere is a life of fear and trembling before God.  It cannot be the highest sphere because the movement between spheres is motivated by psychological discomfort.  In aesthetics there is no meaning, so one despairs. In ethics there is no perfection, so one despairs.  In religion there is no righteousness, so one despairs.  There’s no distinction.  The same inability to “live that way” would push a person out of religion just as it pushed him or her from the other spheres.  It is not compelling to be religiously desperate instead of aesthetically or ethically desperate.  My second objection is that Kierkegaard doesn’t understand true Christianity, or else he would have made it past the fear of God.  Kierkegaard thinks he sees the New Testament truly because he won’t rationalize the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, but he misses out on the reason the New Testament was written at all: Jesus Christ.  If he was listening, he would have realized that Jesus “…did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28).  Kierkegaard should have paid more attention to Hebrews, which tells that Jesus is the “exact representation of [God’s] being” (1:3).  Being such, Jesus shows us that God does not lord his authority over his people, but he cares deeply about their lives (Matt. 20:25 and John 10:1-18).  I’m not saying that God doesn’t ever want us to tremble before him, or that fear serves no purpose.  I’m just saying that, knowing God, it simply can’t be that the meaning of life is to live in a never-ending, religiously-themed, existential panic attack.