Hey Everybody, Marcus here.
Black Pigeon Speaks put out a video recently
entitled: Why Atheism is Vacuous Grandiloquence.
In it he attacks atheism and the likes of
prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins
and Christopher Hitchens.
His thesis covered a number of different subjects.
However, one of the accusations that Black
Pigeon Speaks lays at the foot of atheists
is the absence of an alternative.
He attacks atheists descending into nihilism
and offering no positive post-religious direction.
I agree with Black Pigeon Speaks in so far
that the likes of Hitchens and Dawkins do
not offer anything meaningful.
In fact, I would posit that the atheist community
as it exists as a legacy stemming from the
four horsemen is little more than the faith
that Christian morality will continue to obtain,
at least the parts that said atheists like,
absent the metaphysical justification which
underpin it; namely, God – specifically,
the Christian God.
However, Dawkins and Hitchens are not sources
of any philosophical depth as I can ascertain
from any of their work that I have encountered.
One does not go to Hitchens or Dawkins if
one is at all seriously committed to exploring
the atheistic world view.
To explore an atheistic position one must
turn to philosophy proper.
Indeed, there perhaps is no better source
than Nietzsche, who proclaimed the death of
God, as a guide on what atheism entails.
What I want to do in this response is to take
up Black Pigeon Speaks’ call to showcase
an atheistic alternative to religion.
I do this for the benefit of both the atheist
and theist communities.
Atheists can benefit from the exposure to
a model of thought that does not simply gut
Christian morals of their justifying cause,
but is a completely new paradigm of thought.
For the theist, it helps to showcase what
are the best talking points in relation to
the atheist solution as they may then be challenged
at a higher level of discourse.
To begin to understand what a post-religious
alternative would look like, I will begin
with what is the core idea, or as Nietzsche
calls it “The Most Abysmal Thought.”
This is the concept of the eternal recurrence.
In his work entitled “The Gay Science”,
Nietzsche puts for the following to his reader
in aphorism 341:
“What, if some day or night a demon were
to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness
and say to you: "This life as you now live
it and have lived it, you will have to live
once more and innumerable times more; and
there will be nothing new in it, but every
pain and every joy and every thought and sigh
and everything unutterably small or great
in your life will have to return to you, all
in the same succession and sequence - even
this spider and this moonlight between the
trees, and even this moment and I myself.
The eternal hourglass of existence is turned
upside down again and again, and you with
it, speck of dust!"
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash
your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?...
Or how well disposed would you have to become
to yourself and to life to crave nothing more
fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation
and seal?”
The concept of eternal recurrence is not the
easiest thing to understand.
Nietzsche considered this idea so important
that it is suspected by many Nietzsche scholars
that Nietzsche though it was the core of his
positive philosophical system.
Nietzsche was well aware that the death of
God entailed an unprecedented tide of nihilism.
He wanted to fight this tide as the yes-saying
part of his philosophy.
Many know Nietzsche’s work superficially
as a nihilistic attack on Christianity, the
“no-saying” part of his philosophy.
They often forget that there is a rich project
of “yes-saying.”
In fact, Nietzsche’s work entitled “Thus
Spoke Zaathustra”, is, when taken as a whole,
this exact “yes-saying” positive philosophical
project of overcoming nihilism in a post-religious
world.
To understand the positive side of Nietzsche’s
project it is important to understand his
work “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.”
The remainder of this video will tackle the
subject of this work in an attempt to highlight
the main points and progression of ideas.
To assist me in this, I will be drawing heavily
from Michael Gillespie’s thoughts.
The story that Nietzsche recounts in the first
three parts of Zarathustra is the account
of the path that Zarathustra follows to the
recognition of this titanic thought, his struggle
to bring it to consciousness, and his final
supreme effort to affirm it.
In the first part of the work, Zarathustra
recognizes and explains that he has come to
understand that the ego is an illusion, a
mere projection of the self or body.
The self itself, however, is nothing other
than the collection of passions that struggle
with one another for dominance and control.
The strength of the self depends in part upon
the strength of these passions but more importantly
on their coordination in pursuit of a single
goal.
The establishment of a rank order within the
self is thus the first step to mastery and
this is achieved by the dominance of one passion—what
Zarathustra calls one's virtue—over all
the others.
Behind or beneath all of these passions, however,
are basic biological drives and instincts
and behind them the will to power that characterizes
and motivates all things.
The will to power, according to Zarathustra,
is a will to overcome opposition but its ultimate
goal is self-overcoming in the sense that
it constantly aims to become more than it
is.
This applies not merely to individuals but
to peoples, states, and everything else at
all levels of organization.
As Zarathustra discovers in the second part
of the work, however, such a will always finds
itself already in the flow of time and thus
always already conditioned by a past that
is beyond its control.
In this sense it can never be truly free or
creative, and thus can never truly will.
The rage of the will against this dead hand
of the past, against the “it was,” engenders
what Nietzsche calls the spirit of revenge,
the desire to take revenge against one's own
impotence by finding something or someone
in the present to blame and punish.
In confronting this problem Zarathustra recognizes
that in order for the will to be truly causal
and to escape from the spirit of revenge,
it would have to will backwards.
On the surface this seems to pose an insurmountable
obstacle to truly willing since the past seems
to be always beyond our control, something
over which we never have power.
Nietzsche, however, believed he had an answer
to this problem.
Indeed, the great insight that frees us from
mere reactivity and allows us to be truly
positive, active beings is the thought of
the eternal recurrence.
The reasons for this are not immediately apparent,
even to Zarathustra himself.
He clearly has some inkling of the titanic
importance of this thought long before he
is able to articulate it or affirm it.
In his first account of the idea near the
beginning of part 3 of the work, in “The
Riddle and the Vision,” Zarathustra recounts
to his fellow seafarers that once not long
before when he was walking one evening in
the mountain he found the spirit of gravity,
half-dwarf and half-mole, sitting on his shoulder
whispering to him of the futility of all things.
Zarathustra becomes more and more dispirited
until his courage brings him to confront the
dwarf, telling him that it is “You or I.”
In this confrontation, he warns the dwarf
that he does not know his (Zarathustra's)
most abysmal thought.
This is the setting for the first presentation
of the idea of the eternal recurrence.
As they are stopped by a gateway, Zarathustra
tells the dwarf that there is an eternal path
that leads back the way they have come and
an eternal path ahead of them on the way they
are going.
He says that they contradict one another and
come together at this gateway which is named
“Moment.”
He then asks the dwarf if he believes they
contradict one another eternally.
The dwarf replies that all that is straight
lies, and that time itself is a circle.
Zarathustra warns the dwarf not to be too
easy on himself, and spells out the consequences
of the idea.
On the eternal path leading up to the moment
all things than can happen must already have
happened and on the eternal path going forward
all things that can happen must yet happen.
He asks the dwarf then whether everything
including the very moment they are now in
must not eternally recur.
But at this point in the discussion, terrified
of his own thoughts he grows quieter and quieter,
and then has a vision in which he sees a shepherd
choking on a snake that has crawled into his
mouth.
Something cries out of him to the shepherd
to bite and he does so, spitting out the snake's
head and leaping up, filled with a laughter
that is no human laughter, transfigured into
a godlike being.
Nietzsche wonders how he can go on living
without hearing that laughter and how he can
die now that he has heard it.
The spirit of gravity is a pessimist, and
makes everything small with his crushing teaching
that everything is in vain, that everything
that is born dies.
Zarathustra's will rebels against this notion,
and he confronts the dwarf's pessimism with
a deeper pessimism.
Everything that has been or will be has already
occurred not just once but over and over an
infinite number of times.
The world in other words has no beginning
or end, as Christianity claimed, nor does
it have an ultimate purpose or goal.
And yet it is eternal.
However, Zarathustra does not assert this
point but only poses it as a question.
It is not something that can be dispositively
known and therefore cannot be asserted.
Moreover, Zarathustra is clearly terrified
by the possibility that he might be correct.
The reason that Zarathustra told the dwarf
he was being too easy on himself was that
he only thought the idea of the eternal recurrence
in terms of a circle, that is, in a Cartesian
fashion as a representation within consciousness,
and thus as merely something for a disembodied
ego.
The ego, however, is only the ephemeral surface
of the self.
It isn't enough merely to think the doctrine
of the eternal recurrence as a representation
independent of the self; it must also be lived
or experienced.
It is only when it is not merely thought but
experienced and willed with the whole self
that the thought of the eternal recurrence
can be understood.
Affirming the doctrine of the eternal recurrence
thus does not mean merely accepting it as
something that is necessary in theory but
as something practical that we are always
already a part of.
It is thus not enough for one to say “Yes
I understand that everything horrible and
petty is necessary as part of the whole;”
one must also will them, want all of the horrible
and petty things with all one's heart; not
merely accept them but also love them.
In doing so one takes upon oneself the responsibility
for all things as one's own deed.
This of course means in a certain sense becoming
all things insofar as one becomes or becomes
one with the will behind all things.
To will affirm the eternal recurrence one
must thus give up the illusion of individuality
and notion of the independent integrity of
the ego, and thereby become or become one
with Dionysus.
Dionysus being the Greek God symbolizing oneness
and manyness that Nietzsche often uses in
the symbolism of his philosophy.
Zarathustra recounts the vision to his fellow
travelers, but clearly does not understand
it or know how to interpret it.
He is in fact afraid to recognize consciously
what he already has experienced at some level
of his being, what he already in a sense is.
But the desire to understand the thought behind
his thoughts festers and grows in him until
he eventually forces it to the surface and
into consciousness.
The experience, however, nearly kills him,
first filling him with nausea and then knocking
him out and leaving him unconscious for seven
days.
What happened to him during those seven days
is never explicitly stated, but the section
is entitled, “The Convalescent,” so presumably
it is focused on his recovery from the thought.
From the stories his animals (his eagle and
snake) tell when he regains consciousness,
we gain some insight into what occurred since
Zarathustra remarks that they understand what
he experienced during those seven days.
His animals watched over him during this time
of convalescence and when he awakens they
chatter at him.
Their chattering apparently helps him reattach
himself to life.
He remarks that because of their chattering
the world seems to lie before him like a garden.
Words and sounds he asks rhetorically, are
they not dream bridges and rainbows among
things that remain eternally apart?
This remark is among the most important in
Zarathustra because it gives us some insight
into the ontological character of reality
for Zarathustra.
All things, he suggests remain eternally apart
and are held together only by the dream bridges
of symbols, words, gestures, sounds, etc.
Ontologically, this is a classical nominalist
claim in the tradition of William of Ockham.
He suggests in this way that there are no
universals, no species or genera, but only
radically individualized beings.
The order that we perceive in the world is
then created by symbols of various sorts that
we use to group things together.
The world is then a sheer manyness of radically
different beings, although even to call them
beings or things is a stretch since that attributes
some form of universality to them.
In view of this difficulty, it might be better
to say simply that the world in its core is
a manyness of differents.
The experience of this manyness for Zarathustra
is thus analogous to the experience of Dionysus,
the experience of being torn to pieces.
The world experienced in this way is a sheer
abyss, the original chaos out of which Hesiod
imaged the world to arise.
It is only words and sounds, logos and music,
that form the world into a whole.
Or to put it in terms Nietzsche used elsewhere,
it is only the power of art that gives names
and order to things.
Through art the world thus ceases to appear
as a chaotic manyness and becomes a world,
a beautiful multiplicity within a well-rounded
whole, or as Zarathustra puts it, a garden.
But even here there is a further complication.
Each soul, Zarathustra goes on to say, lives
in its own world, radically and eternally
separate from every other soul.
This absolute alienation follows, of course,
from the earlier ontological claim, but is
also part and parcel of our subjectivity.
The world through art and language is always
as it is only for me.
The world as others perceive it is always
then merely an afterworld for me.
On the surface, this claim very much resembles
Descartes' claim that the cogito ergo sum
experience can only demonstrate to me my own
existence and not that of others.
Nietzsche, however, takes this insight one
step further than Descartes and draws the
radical but not unwarranted conclusion that
if everything is for and through me, then
there is no outside of me.
I am everything that is.
Or to put it another way, if God is dead,
I am god.
Here we have some insight into not just the
idea but the experience of the eternal recurrence,
but the difficulty of affirming it.
If there is no outside me and everything that
is, is through me, then affirming the eternal
recurrence means affirming everything without
exception in its radical and absolute difference,
as primordial Hesiodic chaos, as abyss.
This Dionysian insight is made bearable only
by words and sounds that in Apollinian fashion
make us believe in a world and thus make the
insight into this abyss bearable.
We get some inking of this from the words
of Zarathustra's animals who recount to him
what he has learned during those seven days:
Everything goes around and everything comes
back; eternally rolls the wheel of being.
Everything dies, everything blossoms again;
eternally runs the year of being.
Everything breaks, everything is joined anew;
eternally the same house of being is built.
Everything parts, everything greets every
other thing again; eternally the ring of being
remains faithful to itself.
In every Now, begin begins; round every Here
rolls the sphere There.
The center is everywhere.
Bent is the path of eternity.
For one who thinks the thought of the eternal
recurrence there is no outside himself because
in thinking and affirming it he becomes one
with all things and is thus shattered into
thousands of pieces in the way that Dionysus
is torn to pieces and distributed in the world.
But even in the agony of destruction and dismemberment,
he knows that everything comes back together
again.
This single thought sustains him and empowers
him.
How is Zarathustra able to affirm this thought?
Why is it not for him as for the dwarf or
later the soothsayer a source of pessimism
and despair?
Zarathustra's claim here seems to be that
to the strong, to the healthy examples of
what Nietzsche would later call, ascending
life, this is a joyful realization in spite
of the pain because it means that they will
live their lives over and over again.
Because they can say, “Once more!” in
the face of all pain and suffering, in the
face of all that is petty and disgusting,
the world of the eternal recurrence is a beautiful
world.
Joy as Zarathustra indicates in the “Drunken
Song” is deeper than agony.
For the strong the world is justified.
Because they realize the world is the product
of their will and that they are therefore
not determined by the dead hand of the past,
they are beyond the need for revenge.
In this way, they cease to be reactive and
become active beings, or, as he puts it in
one of his notes, they become a Caesar with
the soul of Christ.
Strong and powerful but also innocent and
affirmative.
What calls such universal affirmation into
question for Zarathustra is the recognition
that not only the strong and noble recur but
also the last man, the ugly, low, and despicable
man.
All efforts to improve man, to set him on
a course to becoming a superhuman being all
still come back to this moment, to the unbearable
pettiness of the moment that he wants to escape.
To affirm the eternal recurrence he thus has
to say yes to everything that he wants to
overcome as well as to everything he longs
for.
He has to love what he most detests.
The recognition of this fact was the snake
that crawled into Zarathustra's throat, the
snake of disgust whose head he had to bite
off and spit out.
And in doing so, he was, he tells us, able
to redeem himself, to redeem himself from
the abyss of his most abysmal thought.
For Nietzsche, as for Christ, the goal in
the end is thus redemption through love.
Nietzsche's claim, however, is different and
his love is at least arguably equal to or
perhaps even greater than that of Christ's
because he actually does love all of his enemies.
Moreover, in his eternity no one is damned
and everyone has a place, although the world
is not paradise to all who are in it.
After affirming the thought of the eternal
recurrence, Zarathustra promises his soul
something like a coming beatitude, urging
it finally to: sing with a roaring song till
all seas are silenced, that they may listen
to your longing—till over silent, longing
seas the bark floats, the golden wonder around
whose gold all good, bad, wondrous things
leap—also many great and small animals and
whatever has light, wondrous feet for running
on paths blue as violets—toward the golden
wonder, the voluntary bark and its master;
but that is the vintager who is waiting with
his diamond knife—your great deliverer,
O my soul, the nameless one for whom only
future songs will find names.
It is Dionysian ecstasy that Zarathustra foretells
here, an ecstasy that Nietzsche imagines replacing
the emotional religious ecstasy of Christianity.
Here he is filled with the anticipation of
such ecstatic laughter, waiting like Ariadne
for the arrival of his god, yet certain of
his arrival precisely because he has been
able to affirm the eternal recurrence and
thus to become one with his god.
Let us put into context Nietzsche's understanding
of religion.
Nietzsche was a student of the history of
religion and was deeply influenced by Friedrich
Creuzer.
Creuzer argued that all Aryan or Indo European
religions were essentially connected, that
there had been an initial revelation in India
and that this revelation in one form or another
had moved westward taking on ever new forms
and names.
This included even Christianity which was
understood in this context not merely by Creuzer
but also by German Romantics such as Hōlderlin
and even Hegel as the final realization of
a religious process that had begun in the
East and come to fruition in Europe or what
he called the Germanic world.
While Nietzsche accepted the idea of a continuity
in Indo-European religions and a transference
from East to West, he was convinced that Christianity
was not a perfection or completion of the
original revelation but its antithesis, that
Christianity in other words rejected everything
that the ancient Greco-Roman world had achieved
in matters of religion.
Indeed, in his view the birth of Christianity
coincided with the death of paganism.
Thus, with the death of the Christian God,
he hopes Dionysus may return again, although
perhaps under a new name produced by future
songs, but exercising the same force he had
in the ancient world.
Nietzsche imagines this return as an apocalyptic
event.
He points in this direction with the title
of the last section of part three of Zarathustra,
“The Seven Seals.”
It becomes explicit at the end of part four.
Zarathustra is waiting for a sign that the
world is ready for his return and for the
proclamation of the doctrine of the eternal
recurrence.
He is convinced, however, that this will only
occur when the level of distress has risen
to its peak, that is, only when all of the
consequences of the death of God have been
realized and swept away all of the moral and
political structures of Christianity.
Only then will it be time for what Zarathustra
calls, the Great Noon.
The last section of part four is called the
sign and ends with Zarathustra's imperative,
“rise now, rise, thou great noon!”
He then begins his descent back to man to
proclaim the doctrine of the eternal recurrence.
The Great Noon is a theme that arises repeatedly
in Nietzsche's later thought and is an integral
part of his final teaching.
It is the moment when humanity must decide
its future, whether to pursue the path to
the Ubermensch or becomes the last man.
This moment as Zarathustra explains occurs
when man is midway between beast and believer.
The meaning of this passage becomes clear
when we view it against the background of
Zarathustra's description of man in the “Prologue”
as a line stretched between beast and Ubermensch.
There are three stages between these two that
he describes in “The Three Metamorphoses,”
the first section in part one: the camel (or
believer), the lion (or destroyer), and the
child (or creator).
The last man stands between the beast and
the camel/believer.
For the last two thousand years, humans have
been believers.
With the death of God this is no longer a
possibility.
Man must either follow the path toward the
Ubermensch or he will inevitably degenerate
into the last man.
The Great Noon is the moment when man stands
midway on the line.
To go on he must transform himself from a
camel/believer into a lion/destroyer.
To follow this path is thus a choice for war
and destruction.
To follow this path humans must become hard,
as Zarathustra points out in section 29 of
“On Old and New Tablets.”
This means above all purging oneself of pity,
which Zarathustra characterizes in part four
as his final sin.
The path to the Ubermensch, as Nietzsche makes
clear in his plans for future works, involves
a long and drawn out war against the remnants
of Christianity and a struggle for power in
the post-Christian world.
The choice for this path in the short run
is thus a choice for the formation of a warrior
class willing to destroy and clear the ground
for the new age, beyond all pity, and thus
beyond even the last vestiges of Christianity.
The next two hundred years in Nietzsche's
view will thus be a time of wars, “the like
of which the world has never seen.”
This period will serve to further harden man.
At the end of this time he then imagines that
the Ubermensch will arise out of this warrior
elite, a Caesar with the soul of Christ.
As Nietzsche himself describes it, it is in
fact the most abysmal thought, the most uncanny
and unsettling, and also the most terrifying.
Its consequences are also monstrous, the collapse
of European morality and two hundred years
of war and destruction.
While these factors might repel most people,
however, they seem essential to Nietzsche.
One does not think and will this thought because
it will make life easier or more pleasurable.
It thus seems unlikely that the thought is
the result of hedonistic desires or even self-interest
narrowly understood.
Moreover, the fact that it threatens to shatter
our humanity is an indication that it takes
us to the very limit of human experience if
not beyond it.
Insofar as it forces the individual who thinks
it to will the worst of all things, it also
offers an escape from resentment and revenge,
and the absolute affirmation of everything.
To will in this way, Nietzsche believes is
to will as a god, a god of course in a universe
that is irremediably tragic.
At the end of the day, Nietzsche thinks that
thinking this thought is something greater
than human.
To think it is to become one with Dionysus
as the spectators of ancient tragedy did,
and thus to participate in the Dionysian ecstasy
of reunion and dismemberment.
Finally, the thought opens up the possibility
for an apocalyptic transformation of the world
and the birth of the Ubermensch.
For Nietzsche the death of God rendered the
spirituality of the last two thousand years
impossible.
His most abysmal thought in his view opened
up a new path.
This was a path filled with pain and suffering,
a path of war and destruction, and filled
with danger.
His experience of the idea of the eternal
recurrence, however, led him to believe that
it was the path humanity must follow, a fact
reaffirmed in the title for the last chapter
of his last work, “Why I am destiny.”
You see, where Black Pigeon Speaks of the
absence of an atheistic alternative and direction,
I would take the criticism in a completely
different direction.
There is an atheistic alternative, but those
who so proclaim themselves atheists these
days would find this direction monstrous.
They find it monstrous because they are atheist
in name only.
In their heart of hearts, they are Christian.
The popular atheism so prevalent online is
only made possible via Christian morality
continuing to obtain.
As Black Pigeon Speaks correctly points out,
one may call oneself an atheist and still
remain moral.
However, such an atheist does not remain moral
because of his atheism but in spite of his
atheism.
To practice a post-Christian, post-religious
morality is to practice a morality that moves
beyond Good and Evil.
This is not something that today’s atheists
are willing or psychologically capable of
doing.
Thanks for listening.
Go team.
