Journal: Hegel, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky
6 September 1999
I have just finished reading the first fifty-four pages of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. To say that the reading was dense and overwhelming would be an understatement. I have a drowning sensation whenever I read philosophers like Hegel. This feeling stems from my mind having an everyday definition of the words that Hegel uses, like “Mind,” “Notion,” “Idea,” et cetera, but realizing that Hegel is using these words in a system that with heavy, deep meanings that I only have a vague understanding. I actually went online to find a “Hegel for Beginners” guide, but I realized that the best way for me to get Hegel is to throw myself into the reading, very much like throwing myself into a pool, and thrash around for a bit until the context of what I am reading builds my vocabulary of the Hegelian system.
This is what I gleaned so far from my reading:
All of Reality is called the Idea. The Mind, also called the Spirit, is the Idea, in and for itself, meaning that the Mind is active Idea (I think), which is not fixed Idea (like Logical Idea). I’m not quite sure if I have all my terms right – after all, I’m still learning. But what I glean from Hegel is that he is beholden to Aristotle, who stresses potentiality and actuality, which is part of Being and is Being. The Mind (and I think Hegel means the human mind) is a manifestation of Idea (all of reality) in humans. The Mind’s Notion (or actuality) is to realize that it is Idea. Mind is already Idea ontologically, but the Mind does not realize this. Only in the knowing does the Mind actualize it’s Notion as being Idea. Until then, Mind is disunited with its Notion. However, because Mind is already Idea beforehand, Mind is both unified and disunited with Idea, which Mind must also realize in order to be unified with Idea, i.e. realize its Notion. This sounds contradictory, and Hegel’s system seems to filled with these contradictions, which thoroughly confused me at first. A friend of mind asked me that if Idea subsumes all of these contradictions (including good and evil), and if Idea is God, then is God a schizophrenic God? My answer to him was “Yes, and God is also a unified God. God is both schizophrenic and unified because God subsumes all qualities, all states, is all. God wouldn’t be God is God didn’t.” I think I answered correctly.
As long as Hegel sticks with ontology, he seems to be on firm ground, even though I have problems understanding him. I found his sections delineating the races in his Anthropology rather disturbing and offensive, but that’s my problem. I also found these sections irrelevant to the subject at hand, and I think that’s Hegel’s problem.
8 September 1999
After reading sections 396 through 405, I realized that some of Hegel’s words were very familiar. In pondering why that was so, I realized that Hegel’s explanation of the senses reminded me of Aristotle, which only gives more evidence that Hegel is “updating Aristotle” (to use Dr. Wood’s words), and thus his system is greatly influenced by Aristotle. But Hegel’s explanation of the stages of man’s development from baby to old man reminded me of a more recent thinker – Erik Erikson, the child psychologist. In his “Anthropology,” Hegel outlines and elucidates much of what the modern world calls Psychology today (which mildly confused me when I saw what Hegel calls Psychology is not this broad, modern usage). I took a couple of psychology classes at UD (once as an undergrad and more recently as a student teacher), and I can see how influential Hegel is to modern-day phenomenological psychology. The wording was very familiar, even with the emphasis of youth becoming man by finding himself in the world by practical concerns, i.e., work. His views on the importance of education, i.e., instruction and discipline, also rings influential on American elementary and secondary education in the first part of this century, especially in the call for a teacher-based education in which the student learns both obedience and his lessons at the same time.
What I find Hegel stressing repeatedly is the interplay between the soul and the world, both manifestations of totality but a totality which the soul must discover for itself as lived out in feeling, learning, working man. In following the practical working out of this development, I was a little startled when Hegel used the word “magic” to describe a state in which the feeling soul has a relationship with an other without mediation, signaling a unity on the anthropological level. Again, I was startled because I have an a priori definition of that word, which I had to quash in order to follow Hegel’s argument. Still, it is an interesting word choice, magic.
13 September 1999
Sections 406 to 412 are odd sections, ranging from some extremely dated examples of “magnetism” (or hypnotism, as I took it to be), analyses of various forms of insanity (including examples of cures, also dated by 20th century standards), to the importance of habit as the necessary development of the actual soul, which is the mediated unity of the soul with its body. In the in depth treatment of insanity and the case studies which Hegel brings up in these sections covering insanity, I sometimes forgot that I was reading a philosophical treatise. As I have mentioned in my previous journal entry, I can see Hegel as being an influence in modern-day phenomenological psychology. Much of his wording is similar to some articles I have read in a Psychology of Adolescence class that I took last year. His stress of the “soul” (or self) needing to externalize itself, become separated from the body, find its content (or meaning-system) in the world, and then become proficient in the self’s body (and the world, which provides the criteria for forming proficiency) through training, which becomes habit, echoes throughout modern-day phenomenological psychology.
It’s been a while since I studied Aristotle, but I vaguely remember the importance of habit in shaping the soul. Upon looking at my old Philosophy and the Ethical Life notes (wow, these are nine years old!), I see in my notes this phrase: “Moral virtue is a state of character, formed by habit; for example, a man is a brave man by habitually doing brave deeds.” Thus both with Aristotle and Hegel, habit is necessary for the development of the soul. For Aristotle, habit develops virtue. For Hegel, habit develops the actual soul. I believe “virtue” and “actual soul” are like pronunciations of the word tomato, i.e., Aristotle and Hegel are pretty much talking about the same concept.
Well then. Now that I know that Hegel tends to speak a little ahead of himself and then, after explaining a new concept (every-day usage of that word, not Hegel’s) links it with a review, I find Hegel a little more comprehending. I am not saying that he has gotten easy to read, mind you. But that odd drowning sensation has ebbed a little, and I believe that I am now treading philosophical water with the man.
16 September 1999
In reading sections 413 through 450, a few passages popped up for me, to which I shall respond.
Zusatz to section 435: “This subjugation of the slave’s egotism forms the beginning of true human freedom. ....Without having experienced the discipline which breaks self-will, no one becomes free, rational, and capable of command. To become free, to acquire the capacity for self-control, all nations must therefore undergo the severe discipline of subjugation to a master” “(175).
The rational part of me understands this passage as being true. In the Hobbesian sense of a state of nature, which I assume exists in the natural soul, the individual self-will, caught up in itself, wills itself on another without regard for the other’s individuality because, for the self-will, that other’s individuality does not exist. Therefore, there is diffidence, war, and no real liberty (if my memory of Hobbes serves me right). Only with the reigning in of one’s will, usually with the aid of some higher governor, does man form the stable space to make rational choices and thus become free. Theoretically, this sounds true. Unfortunately, I do not think this is what happens in practice, and I do not know if anybody would call slavery a necessary stage in which state must undergo in order to become free. I suppose this “slavery” stage is akin to the “insanity” stage that the natural soul must undergo in order to attain feeling soul -- not necessarily part of the process but showing the extremes that the mind might go through in the process.
This passage also reminds me of what Nietzsche was writing against.
Zusatz to section 436: “The master confronted by his slave was not yet truly free, for he was still far from seeing in the former himself. Consequently, it is only when the slave becomes free that the master, too, becomes completely free” (176).
Common-sense tells me that this passage is wrong: how can the master be not free since he has a slave, who is ostensibly not free? American history, however, tells me that this passage is right: the master, enslaved in his role of master, is not fully human until he recognizes that his slave is also human, is also a man. The slave realizes his freedom by seeing himself as human but shackled and also knowing that his master is human but without integrity. Thus as it was with black slavery in the U.S.: the state, and the citizens in that state, could not fully move on as a republic, could not become “completely free,” until their slaves were also free.
Zusatz to section 449: “People often imagine that the poet, like the artist in general, must go to work purely intuitively. This is not absolutely not the case. On the contrary, a genuine poet, before and during the execution of his work, must meditate and reflect; only in this way can he hope to bring out the heart, or the soul, of the subject-matter, freeing it from all the externalities in which it is shrouded and by so doing, organically develop his intuition” (200).
This passage reminds me of Wordsworth, and the misconception that most people have when they think of Wordsworth and Romantic poetry in general. Sure, poetry is an expression of feeling; but only after that initial, intuitive feeling has been meditated and reflected upon in a philosophic silence, “emotion recollected in tranquillity” as Wordsworth puts it. There is much artifice in art, and there is much reason in feeling, which I believe both Wordsworth and Hegel would agree.
17 September 1999
I have read sections 451 to 482. Again, I shall respond to some passages that I found of interest.
From section 462: “We think in names.” (220)
I once took a linguistic class in which I learned of Chomsky’s theory that spoken language is a human instinct, i.e., human beings are hard-wired for language and can only think, become fully human, in language, whether that be the invented language of toddlers or the highest Queen’s English. Also, thoughts of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and his Divine Names come to my mind, although I never studied this thinker but heard him second-hand from a friend of mind. From what I gathered, names and naming are also distinctly human, and it is a human action that is like the image of God, a participation in the Creation. In the second creation story in Genesis, before God formed woman from man’s rib, God presented man all of the animals and plants, and man named them all. Hegel’s phrase “We think in names” has deep philosophic and theologic roots, and I suppose that is the point.
From section 472: “Evil is nothing but the incompatibility between what is and what ought to be.” (232) Also from section 472: “...in life, and still more in mind, we have this immanent distinction present: hence arises the Ought: and this negativity, subjectivity, ego, freedom are the principles of evil and pain. Jacob Bohme viewed egoity (selfhood) as pain and torment, and as the fountain of nature and of the spirit.” (232)
From somewhere in my brain is the phrase “Evil is the lack of good.” I think it is from Augustine, perhaps written down in my undergrad notes somewhere, but this definition of evil is the basis for Satan being not equal to God (like a dual theology of a Good God and an Evil God, as in Zoroastrianism). Satan is evil because he is the farthest created being from God, who is Good Itself; thus he is the most evil. This rather large space between Satan and God is where the Ought is and where man, and his mind, play the drama of working out mind’s will and reaching towards What Ought To Be. This space is dramatic because of man’s will, which is free, and this freedom can reach towards great spirit, e.g., God, or great “pain and torment,” e.g., Satan.
I see now that Hegel tries to reason through theology, break the Aquinas barrier of Revelation. But I think in Names, and most of these Names are Revealed.
22 September 1999
I just finished reading the “Mind Objective” chapter, sections 483 through 552. What strikes me about Mind Objective is the convergence of Religion and State as necessary for the actualization of the Mind. On one level, this convergence makes sense since, as Hegel says in section 552, “it is vain to delude ourselves with the abstract and empty assumptions that the individuals will act only according to the letter or meaning of the law, and not in the spirit of their religion where their inmost conscience and supreme obligation lies” (287). I can think of several examples from history and current events, egs. civil disobedience on the part of Martin Luther King Jr.; the voice of the Religious Right in American politics. But what bothers me a little is the scent of theocracy that such a convergence may result, especially since Hegel looks to “the Protestant state” (291) as his example of such a convergence. I cannot help thinking that Hegel, for all of his call for a universal totality that includes all particulars, seems too particular in his particular Zeitgeist: a Protestant German philosopher living under the constitutional monarchy sees a Protestant state ruled under a constitutional monarchy as the meet state for the coming about the Notion of the Mind. Perhaps because I am situated in the Zeitgeist of American cynicism and asunderness of Church and State that I perceive Hegel a bit cautiously.
I have been thinking of Hegel’s “Ought,” and much of Hegel’s teleologically based universal history, a history in which its aim is the actualization of Reason, seems to be driven by the “Ought.” As mentioned in an earlier journal, the space between what is and what ought to be is very wide, and great moments of irrationality, like Stalinism and Nazism, make one wonder whether there is much Irrationality working through man’s actions besides the Rational. I think it is this Irrationality that spurred Milton to write his political tracts, like “Areopagitica,” which rationally argued for freedom of the press, what ought to be. But he bumped against what is, and nobody (at least nobody with power) considered his argument.
27 September 1999
Some further thoughts on the role of the State and then man’s relationship to God.
Overall, man is guided by the Rational, and the State, a construct of man’s reason, is also guided by the Rational of the man that creates it. Therefore, the State is created in man’s image, and thus if that man’s reason is does not fully actualize the Rational, which guides the totality of everything, including everything Good, i.e., fully realize the notion of his Mind, which is Liberty, then the State that is created from such a man’s reason will also not realize Liberty and appear Irrational. Hence, the historical existence of such regimes as Stalinism and Nazism.
So the State is created in Man’s image, but once created becomes the organism in which man belongs and fulfills his Mind’s notion of liberty. Similarly, Man is created in God’s image in the Judeo-Christian tradition. I have finished reading “Absolute Mind,” and I realize that the Logos incarnated – Christ – is the concrete unity of revealed religion and man’s Mind, in concert with divine man’s awareness of his divinity, realizes the Absolute Mind (Spirit) when it is aware that it is the concrete unity of Absolute Mind (Spirit) in Philosophy. This realization makes me ask is Man God? This question does not mean is God Pantheistic, i.e., is God in Everything, which Hegel discounts clearly (section 573). What I refer to is the “notion of philosophy [as] self-thinking Idea , the truth aware of itself” (section 574) in which “philosophy appears as a subjective cognition, of which liberty is the aim, and which is itself the way to produce it” (576): if God, as Reason, is not some abstract form a priori to His manifestation in Logic, Nature, and Spirit but is always in everything in a manner akin to circles within circles without a beginning and akin to a liquid in which one cannot remove Reason in these manifestations even on the most concrete level, and man’s Mind actualizes this Reason by becoming aware of it, then does Man in fact create God in philosophy? In other words, like the State, is God created in Man’s image, and, like the State, once becomes the organism in which man also belongs in order to fulfill Man’s notion of liberty? I think Hegel says “No” to this question, but it is a problem that I do not think Hegel resolves very well, what with the primacy of man’s Mind as being necessary in the actualization of Absolute Mind and what without the creation (so to speak) of a Platonic realm outside of the concrete realm to posit God as definitely prior to Man. Perhaps this problem in resolved dialectically because God as Creator appears to be prior to God as Son (Logos), and so man’s Mind, mirroring Christ’s Mind, is also prior in the order of the dialectic.
30 September 1999
In my previous journal entry, which was the last one for the Hegel part of my journal for this class, I mentioned a problem which I saw in the “Absolute Mind” section of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Simply put, if God as Reason (Absolute Spirit) is the underlying meaning in everything and, in the metaphor of circles, there is not clear beginning and end to God in His manifestations in the concrete, but Man’s Mind, upon becoming aware of God, is the actualization of God in the concrete unity, then does Man, in fact, create God? It is understood that Hegel resolves this dialectically because God as Creator appears to be prior to God as Son (Logos), and so this a priori relationship, which mirrors the a priori relationship of God to Man, does exist. But if one is to belief that such a revealed truth does not come from without (i.e., God) but comes from within (Man’s Mind), then who is to stop somebody from thinking that Man does, in fact, create this God?
This somebody, of course, is Nietzsche, and Nietzsche does away with the philosophical acrobatics that Hegel employs to account for the existence of God separate from Man. He speaks relatively plainly: Yes, Man does create God as a way of giving himself limits in this wild and wide world of ours. Unfortunately, man forgot that God is created in his own image, has worshipped God like a graven image, and has lost touch of why he created God in the first place. With the advent of democratic socialism, in which everybody is like everybody else with the proverbial chicken in every pot, two cars in the two car garage, and Social Security to ward off the wolf at the door, God as savior to a problematic world is no longer needed, and all the trappings to worship this God no longer have any real meaning. In this neglect, Man has killed God, and now he only gives tithes to a corpse. Since Man, or, to use Nietzsche’s terminology, the herd, has forgotten that he created God in the first place, then, of course, the herd will not be aware that God is dead and thus real meaning is gone from their lives, replaced with ease, comfort, and drugs. In seeing this culture of the herd and the culmination of the herd, the Last Man, I cannot help thinking about Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which Man has fashioned a Utopia for himself with social conditioning, secure jobs, universal healthcare and entertainment, and plenty of drugs (without the side effects) if one starts to feels uneasy with one’s self. In such a world, drama cannot exist, poetry cannot exist, tragedy cannot exist, because the passions stirred up by such things will destroy this society. In such a world, there can never be Overmen because all the Higher Men have been conditioned out, exiled, or killed in utero.
Another thought: Buddhism and Confucianism are philosophies, even though some followers, especially Buddhists, may treat them as religions, in which there is another realm outside the earth, outside the body. Most Westerners misunderstand much of what is going on in these philosophies. Perhaps Nietzsche, in appropriating Eastern philosophies and even religions (for after all, Zoroastrianism and Judeo-Christianity originated in the Middle East), is generally misunderstood because he does not sound nor speak like a Westerner.
5 October 1999
Thus Spoke Zarathustra flips Hegel on its head (or, more aptly, on its feet) and inverts Christianity by stressing the primacy of the body over spirit. Nietzsche, in attacking Christianity, uses the same tactics as the Bible (especially in the Gospels), in which Zarathustra, the solitary harbinger of the overman, uses parables to impart his “wild wisdom” to his disciples. So instead of parables about the workers in the field, we get parables about the master over these workers. Instead of parables about a people joined together in a covenant with God, we get parables about he-who-would-create-god, the overman. Much of this work is so strongly anti-Christian that I think that perhaps Nietzsche should have titled this work The Antibible, in keeping with his Antichrist. But since Nietzsche evidently depends on Christianity for his foil, depends on his greatly towards his doctrine against pity, against a Redeemer (with a capital R), and against the equalizing of men in God’s eyes, I wonder if perhaps he is doing a service to Christianity qua reformer, much like Martin Luther was for the Roman Catholic Church, pointing out the corruption of the institution in which it no longer really served the purpose for which it was formed, i.e., the salvation of man. Zarathustra, from what I have read so far, damns men for their hypocrisy more than anything else: e.g., pity is really ressentiment, religious belief is really an activity (like watching tight-rope walkers), etc. The reason why the Last Man is so abhorrent to Zarathustra and nauseates him is because the Last Man accepts the institutions set forth in accepted values but only does so out of custom and tradition; the Last Man does not live deliberately, does not question why he does the things he does, and does not even believe that most of the customary religious tenets that he supposedly adheres to is relevant in his shallow life towards ease and happiness. Last Man does not live nor think deeply, which is what Zarathustra tries to teach. In repudiating the Last Man, in much the same way that Christ repudiates the Pharisees, Nietzsche (via Zarathustra) may actually be doing a service to Christianity, as a Devil’s Advocate, to which Christianity, if it is to be true to itself, must acknowledge the accusations put forth from this advocate and answer with solutions.
October 7, 1999
What makes the Overman the Overman?
I was discussing Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra with a friend of mine over coffee in an Italian restaurant, and I asked the above question. His answer was, “The Overman is the person who recognizes that he is the definer of his horizon of meaning. Once he recognizes that, then he becomes the Overman.”
I replied, “If that is so, then Zarathustra would be the Overman because he is the first to realize that God is dead and thus Man is the true creator of his horizons of meaning throughout history, even though Man refuses to admit it. But Zarathustra is the harbinger of Overman, not Overman himself, in much the same way that John the Baptist is the harbinger of Christ. Also, I think that Nietzsche posits the Overman as singular, that is, there can only be one Overman in the world at any given time. What I mean from my earlier question is: Where does the Overman come from? How does he come about? Zarathustra speaks of Man as a rope stretched from ape to Overman. I’m trying to understand how Overman comes from Man.”
“It sounds like the Overman is an evolutionary progression from Man,” my friend responded. “If that is so, then the Overman is no longer Man; he is another species entirely, the Overman, just like the ape is another species from Man, who is homo sapiens.”
“I don’t think Zarathustra sees the rope metaphor biologically,” I began. “I think Zarathustra sees the rope image as a metaphor for inner self-control of one’s actions and thoughts. An ape is pure bestiality, consumed with various appetites and desires which dictate his actions without any thought; the worst of the rabble would be here, with Ape, who can only live within the confines of his own petty thoughts and shallow, self-serving deeds. Man, as the rope that progresses from Ape, moves from the mud of Ape-ness, towards the various fragments of what it means to be Man, whom, by increasing levels of self-control, unifies the various fragments of Man. These levels of self-control comes out of Man as levels of creativity, such that what is in Man other men can see and respond to this level of self-control.”
“I don’t understand. What do you mean by self-control and others responding to a Man’s self-control?”
I thought for a moment and replied, “Zarathustra says that in order for Man to command, he must obey. What I take that to mean is, in order for a man to command others, he must be able to command himself and obey his own commands. What I mean by self-control is that a man retreats into solitude, stills the various appetites and desires that wrack his body and mind, and comes to that point in which he realizes who he really is and what he is meant to do. In other words, he recognizes a vocation in which he is competent, and he develops within himself a set of life principles to which he must adhere to in order to live his life as true to his vocation. Those set of principles I take to be a horizon of meaning for that man. When a principled man practices his vocation, other men respond to that vocation and feel impelled to follow that vocation. In this way, in obeying himself, Man commands others without force or even saying that he commands.”
“That Man sounds like the Overman, but you say that there can only be one Overman. How is this Man different from the Overman?”
“This principled Man I take to be Zarathustra’s Higher Man. There have been many Higher Men in history: Confucius, Christ, Shakespeare, to name just a few. They are Higher Men because they have created principles – horizons of meaning – which survive after they are gone and still influence various peoples today. But note that I said, ‘various peoples.’ Not everybody follows Confucius, not everybody follows Christ, and not everybody follows Shakespeare. They are Higher Men because their horizons of meaning cut across all time but not across all space, i.e., do not influence ALL peoples. Also, such Higher Men attribute their insights to something outside themselves: Ancestors, God, a Muse. The Overman overcomes these obstacles of time, space, and origin of creation: his creation of the ultimate horizon of meaning will influence all peoples in all times, and he will recognize that he is the sole creator of his horizon of meaning and no other. When a Higher Man overcomes these obstacles, then he becomes the Overman.”
My friend replied, “I think you just answered your question of what makes the Overman.” Then he drank his coffee.
12 October 1999
The Overman uses his Will-to-Power to create his own horizon of meaning, which overflows his self into an external creation. This external creation takes on a life on its own such that it overcomes the Overman himself and influences other Men without the Overman being there in person, like Zarathustra saying to his disciples at the Motley Cow that they lose him so that they can find themselves (p. 190).
It is clear how the Overman and Will-to-Power are related. His Will-to-Power is not merely physical force, not a subjugation of the rabble, but a creative force which draws men to it as speaking to their soul, as a guide for their own search for what is competent in themselves.
But how does the Eternal Recurrence of the Same fit in all of this?
I am reminded of the gross misunderstanding of Nietzsche, which his sister and those who take his aphorisms out of context use for their own personal agendas. The danger of Nietzsche is Zarathustra’s contempt and nausea for the rabble and his stress of the future in his doctrine of the Overman and Will-to-Power. Break all the old tablets! But how can the Overman unite the fragments of man into a whole horizon of meaning if the Overman is contemptible of the past? What arises from such an unresolved contempt is the despot. Says Zarathustra, “A great despot might come along, a shrewd monster who, according to his pleasure and displeasure, might constrain and strain all that is past till it becomes a bridge to him, a harbinger and herald and cockcrow. This, however, is the other danger and what prompts my further pity: whoever is of the rabble, thinks back as far as the grandfather; with the grandfather, however, time ends.” (p. 314). A contempt for the past is a contempt for time itself; in doing so limits the Overman to only one direction, to the future simply. The doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same opens the Overman to the past as well as the future. The Overman’s Will-to-Power also wills horizons of meaning in the past because the past eternally recurs into the present and will recur into the future. But this self-same doctrine also orders the Overman’s Will-to-Power such that he does not fall into the trap of the despot: since his choices are eternally recurring, then his choices better be good ones, competent ones. The Eternal Recurrence of the Same thus becomes part of the song in which all of being and becoming arises into the living, becomes part of the command in which the Overman forms within himself, found in solitude. All of being resounds this song of the eternal recurrence, even Zarathustra’s animals resounds this song, prompting Zarathustra, in the end of Part Three, to sing to Eternity, even loving it above his Wisdom.
15 October 1999
How is the Eternal Recurrence of the Same problematic?
As mentioned above, Eternal Recurrence is a necessary part of the Overman’s Will-to-Power. It forms the basis for which the Overman remains honest to his own command and his own horizon of meaning. The Eternal Recurrence, which states that all things has been, is, and will be once again, posits how the fabric of Eternity inserts itself into the pocket of the Moment. This general idea in itself is intelligible. What makes the Eternal Recurrence problematic is the second half of the phrase, i.e., “of the Same.” It is not the Eternal Recurrence of similar types, similar kinds, or even the setting of precedence such that others in the present look to the past as a guide or that others in the future look to the present (thus, their past) as a guide to solve similar problems that may come up in life. The Eternal Recurrence of the Same is the was, is, and will be of exactly the same people, the same circumstances, the same life, without one difference, without one change. Therein lies the problem because why does Nietzsche need the Eternal Recurrence to be of exactly the same life?
The image of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, as two infinitely long paths converging at one point, the Moment, does not really describe the concept. Instead, imagine one, continuous traintrack going in one direction with a railcar filled with all of the world’s people and events in that railcar. Imagine that railcar is infinitely duplicated behind it on the traintrack and also infinitely duplicated in front of it on the traintrack. The only difference from one railcar to the other is Time: each railcar is like a successive frame of film, in which each railcar is a frozen Moment. Instead of the railcars moving on the traintrack of Time, Time moves through each railcar, animating it. This concept has a name in modern physics: the multiverse corollary to the fundamental problem of quantum mechanics. The fundamental problem of Q.M. is, essentially, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, in which one cannot observe with any certainty the location or the time of where a given quantum particle could be; the corollary to this is that, in the realm of probability, that particle is in all locations in all time periods in relation to the observer. The observer cannot escape the probability system of the uncertain particle.
The Overman thus becomes that observer that ESCAPES this closed system, that can, to use the railcar image, step out of the railcar and see ALL of the railcars, immaculately perceive all of the railcars. Like A. Square in Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, who becomes dizzy when he rises to the third dimension and looks at his whole, second dimension world, the Overman becomes nauseous when he initially rises above himself and the world and looks at the whole, the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Also, like A. Square, who perceives the truth of his world and returns to his world, the Overman perceives the Eternal Recurrence and returns to the Moment in the world.
(Another image of the Overman is the earthly neo-Christ. Instead of God who comes down to Earth, incarnated as Jesus Christ, and then returns to Heaven, the Overman comes from Man, overcomes Man to become the Overman, and then returns to Man as the Overman.)
Is Nietzsche’s concept of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same and quantum physic’s multiverse corollary just a coincidence?
20 October 1999
Why is pity Zarathustra’s last sin, and why does Zarathustra esteem the Ugliest Man?
Pity is a difficult concept because the common-sense view sees pity as admirable. A person, seeing another suffer, feels bad for him, which is pity, and in response to this pity tries to alleviate the suffering of this other person. In this sense, pity and mercy are synonymous. But Zarathustra sees pity as not admirable but, in fact, as a sin. It is a sin because, inextricably caught up with feeling bad for the sufferer, the pitying feels at the same time, “I am glad I am not him, but he should be like me, and I know how I can make him be like me.” Says Zarathustra, “Having seen the sufferer suffer, I was ashamed for the sake of his shame; and when I helped him, I transgressed grievously against his pride.” (p. 201). The pitying transgresses the pride of the sufferer, whose pride is his suffering, with his pity, which devalues that pride by trying to take it away by external means. Says Zarathustra, the pitying “are lacking too much in shame.” In other words, pity is the self’s refusal to see oneself by only looking at others. Shame, however, is the self turning its eye on itself, becoming aware of a lack in oneself that needs to be filled. This lack within oneself if not filled by another, i.e., through the almsgiving of the pitying, but through self-creation, through acceptance of one’s suffering as one’s own, one’s own creation, and thus is great. Thus, Zarathustra esteems the Ugliest Man because the Ugliest Man realizes that the source of his pity (his ugliness) should not be pitied but should be respected for its “great misfortune, for great ugliness, for great failure” (p. 377). In realizing that God is Pity personified, the Ugliest Man kills pity by asserting his ugliness as his and his alone, his greatest creation. Unlike the other Higher Men, the Ugliest Man is so creative in his powers that he is even able to create a god from a donkey, as seen in the “Ass Festival.”
21 October 1999
In the end of the Fourth Part, Zarathustra becomes the Overman, “glowing and strong as a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains” (p. 439), which ends the development of Zarathustra from unheard hermit in the wilderness to teacher with disciples to Overman. In the beginning, Zarathustra tries to speak to the many and is ridiculed, only is able to speak to a dead man, then chooses to speak to a few at the Motley Cow, then speaks to even more few at the blessed isles and on the ship traveling away from the blessed isles, and finally hosts the higher men who seek him out in his domain, around his cave on top of the mountain. Zarathustra would speak to each group of people and then would return to his cave to his solitude, in which his body would inform his soul. After a time he would return, or go under, back to people again to speak. In the Fourth Part, he gathers in his errand to find the source of the cry of distress the Higher Men into his cave, and he realizes that the cry of distress comes from the Higher Men. The Higher Men, the best Men of the age, cannot overcome their melancholy, which is why they cry in distress for Zarathustra. Zarathustra, their teacher, unwittingly pities them, sending them to his cave. In pitying them, Zarathustra succumbs to the final sin with which the soothsayer says that he has come. In pitying them, the Higher Men do not realize that they need to lose Zarathustra in order to follow his teachings, and they begin to slip into the idolatrous mode of the Last Man, which they had mocked in the Ass Festival just the night before. In the morning, the Higher Men “had awakened and arranged themselves in a procession to meet Zarathustra and bid him good morning” (p. 438) as if they were in procession to greet a king. They cannot overcome this all-too-human habit of idolatry, which the lion, who only greets him who overcomes himself, recognizes by roaring at the Higher Men, who disappear into the security of the cave. Zarathustra is higher than the Higher Men, and he finally overcomes his last obstacle to his final evolution to Overman: “Pity! Pity for the higher man! ...Well, then, that has had its time! My suffering and my pity for suffering – what does it matter? Am I concerned with happiness? I am concerned with my work” (p. 439). In overcoming his pity and the Last Man’s concern for happiness, Zarathustra is prepared to be a creator, without the secure trappings of mockery (like the Ugliest Man) or religion (like the Last Pope).
Metaphorically, the Higher Men are fragments of the Overman, which Zarathustra collects in his cave. After the drunken song, in which Zarathustra calls for all the Higher Men to join him, and after night has passed, Zarathustra emerges from the cave like a newborn god, having united the fragments into a Whole Man, the Overman. In this way, the Fourth Part is an appropriate ending to Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
26 October 1999
What can one make of such a family as the Karamazov? How can one account for such a patriarch as Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov?
In a burst of optimism and energy, I read The Brothers Karamazov for the first time ever in one week. By the last one hundred pages of the book, I was very impatient with the defense lawyer and prosecutor to finish their final speeches, and when I read that Dmitri was found guilty, it was a bit of a let down and, yet, at the same time, a relief. Much goes on in this book, and even though the narrator devotes much to the brothers, the spirit of Fyodor, like the spirit of Caesar, haunts the lives of the brothers. Much of their lives, I think, are in reaction to being sons of such a man. A self-declared buffoon, Fyodor certainly lives to a standard that is not the standards set forth by good manners nor social graces. Dmitri reacts against his father’s seemingly amoral sensuality with his own sense of gentleman’s honor; but he still has the Karamazov sensuality, which will bind him passionately to the suffering of others. Ivan reacts against his father’s vulgar irrationality with his own sense of abstract rationality; but he still has the Karamazov sensuality, which demands Ivan not to dismiss passion in the truth, which may look like irrationality and vulgarity. Alyosha reacts against his father’s sins and disrespectful blasphemies; but he still has the Karamazov sensuality, which will show Alyosha that great sinners are also great believers. Fyodor, the root of the Karamazov sensuality, is a grotesque buffoon, i.e., a fool. But as seen in the literary tradition of the fool, the fool speaks the truth in a world filled with masks and lies.
28 October 1999
The critic Bakhtin writes of the carnival in fictional works such as Rabelais’ Gargantuan and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The carnival is literally a paradox, a time of masks and sinful revelry just before the period of fasting, abstinence, and suffering. In the carnival, grave leaders become rambunctious peasants and vice versa. All traditions are turned upside down, and the greatest fools become the wisest of men.
The Brothers Karamazov is a carnival, swept up in a polyphony of voices in which the characters put on masks and make show. Even the narrative voice that unifies the many voices is a character, a townsman relating a story that happened thirteen years ago in his little town to a stranger, the reader. The many types of genres in this saga of a novel: Ivan’s poem of the Grand Inquisitor, Alyosha’s saint’s life testimony of Father Alyosha, the speeches of the defense and the prosecution, for examples, only reflect the polyphony of voices of the novel. Like the carnival, in which many people are doing many things all at the same time, The Brothers Karamazov has a whirlwind of characters doing many things while other characters are doing other things at the same time. While the narrator tries to give an account lineally of the events, the characters prevent him, forcing the narrative voice to flashback to many years back or backtrack to the beginning of the day but with a different character; for example, in order for the narrator to introduce Smerdyakov, he must first tell of his mother, Stinking Lizaveta, and the rumor that Fyodor is his father. Another example is that while Alyosha had visited Grushenka and then returned to the monastery, Dmitri had gone to see Lygavy and then returned in town to find Grushenka. While Dmitri was cavorting with Grushenka in Mokroe, Smerdyakov had murdered Fyodor. The whirlwind of characters just missing each other while acting out their chosen roles also contributes to the carnival; even minor characters of the first half of the book become major characters in the second half of the book, i.e., Krasotkin and Ilyusha.
2 November 1999
Dostoevsky, in searching for the Christ figure in The Brothers Karamazov, also searches for whole Man.
What I mean by whole Man is holistic humanity, what it means to be a human being in the totality that is the reality in which Man finds himself and, thus, makes himself at home in this totality.
I think that Hegel, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky have the same motive for their creative working-out of the problem searching for the whole Man: reality seems to be fragmented, alien to man, and man can easily slip into self-serving subjectivity, i.e., slip into the existentialist hell of Descartes’ “I doubt, therefore I am.” Doubting is not the problem; not being able to move forward, outward, from that doubt is the human problem.
Why three protagonists? Why three brothers? Dostoevsky gives us three brothers because they are only fragments of the whole Man. Nietzsche, in the mouthpiece Zarathustra, speaks of the rabble as being fragments of Man: an ear here, a brain here, a heart over there. Caught up in the noble lie of cynical unbelievers pretending Christian morality, or, even worse, simple believers preferring easy Christian believers, Zarathustra’s ultimate teaching is that joy and woe are inextricably linked, that a full life of the whole Man includes suffering, includes woe. Even though Nietzsche’s God is Ivan’s ineffectual Christ, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky arrive at a similar truth of the human condition: suffering, doubt, pain are a part of what it means to be fully human. To deny one’s own acknowledgment that one feels suffering, doubt, pain, and – equally important – that others feel the same suffering, doubt, pain is deny one’s own humanity. Rakitin denies this fundamental truth of the human condition, and, in effect, becomes a devil, like the devil in Ivan’s vision who visits him in his room. Rakitin is more demon than man, and the three brothers, before their crises and before their visions, are more like fragments of man or like little children, needing to grow up.
What is problematic about Ivan’s Christ is that he does not acknowledge suffering and conversely, does not acknowledge the responsibility that comes with seeing the universality of suffering, i.e., that one’s own suffering is in communion with everybody else’s suffering. Everybody is responsible for everybody else. Ivan’s Christ does not acknowledge this. But, as Alyosha and Father Zosima know, the real Christ does and has acknowledged this truth. Ivan responds to Alyosha “No, I have not forgotten Him” (227), but, in fact, he does. Ivan has forgotten the awful pain of kenosis and the awful pain of crucifixion of the real Christ. In bringing his fragmented brothers together, Dostoevsky ensures that they feel a real emptying and crucifixion; in doing so, they participate in the communion of suffering and, in one sense, become Christ-like in their total humanity.
4 November 1999
How is Russia a reflection of the Karamazov brothers? How is the work The Brothers Karamazov a reflection of the Karamazov brothers?
As mentioned earlier, the Karamazov brothers are fragments of a whole Man. Similarly, the Russia of modernity is also fragmented into the Westerners, who disparage the past and the Church, and Slavophiles, who disparage western views and slavishly follow the Church. Both views are inadequate, though, to describe the Russia, which is in flux and experiencing great change. Without understanding the other viewpoint, Russians remain divided, and Russia herself remains divided. Without the past, Westerners are incapable of building upon a foundation to enact real, palpable change for the good; without Western criticism, Slavophiles are incapable of resolving long-standing problems of hunger and want while encountering the new problems of the West attacking them for being enslaved to custom, of not having real liberty. Russia, fragmented into these two views, finds herself incapable of coming to terms with the real suffering her people encounter, and she ends up with these two views as a childish crutch.
Thus, Russia is on the cusp of becoming a different Russia, of “growing up,” so to speak. As also mentioned earlier, the Karamazov brothers are immature in their spiritual development; in fact, they are like idealistic (or, similarly, stubbornly cynical) adolescents, involved in themselves. Faced with external problems, they need to solve the internal problems which plague their souls. Even though the brothers are very different from each other, their problems are the same: they do not want to be responsible for everybody’s suffering, for everybody’s sin. The growing up is the movement from adolescent self-centeredness towards other people, as being part of the community as is, even if the community is a community of suffering, a community of buffoons, a community of sinners. Similarly, unless Russia can accommodate both Westerners and Slavophiles into a unified nation, then Russia remains immature.
The makeup of the book itself reflects this movement from fragments to unity. The Brothers Karamazov consists of different kinds of writing/literature: Ivan’s poem, Father Zosima’s saint’s life, various songs and verse (especially spoken and sung by Dmitri), persuasive speeches, for examples. These fragments, which can be taken separately, contribute to the larger work that is The Brothers Karamazov and, when taken together, form a coherence that signal a maturity in the characters. It is fitting that the novel ends with children, because the children in the end are no longer the immature people described throughout the novel but the child-like, suffering people which come to Christ in his totality.
9 November 1999
I have figured out why Mitya annoys me so.
His stubborn honor is a self-laceration, an omen of pride which must be stripped away – literally and spiritually. Until it is stripped away, Mitya strikes me as impulsive, buffoonish, even down-right stupid:
“Write down at once... at once... ‘that I snatched up the pestle to go and kill my father... Fyodor Pavlovich... by hitting him on the head with it!’ Well, now are you satisfied, gentlemen? Are your minds relieved?” he said, glaring defiantly at the attorneys. (p. 444)
On the margins of this passage, I could not help but write stoopid (purposely misspelling). Is Mitya that out of touch will the real world? He reminds me of honorable Brutus or honest Othello, ill-suited for the corruption that exists in his world such that the forces that are suited for that world (the Capsizes, the Lagos, the Smerdyakovs) easily fell the stupidly honest, the stupidly good. For, in fact, Mitya is stupidly good, in his fashion, in such a manner as Satan is stupidly good seeing Eve: aware of goodness and awed by it but unable to exact goodness himself, out of close-minded pride. What will strip Mitya of this stubborn honor that renders him stupidly good?
The three torments, that reveals Mitya’s self-laceration to the outside world, which also reveals to Mitya just how absurd his honor is in the world of modern Russia, helps to strip away this stubborn honor, logically leading to a physical stripping of his clothes: “He could never, even a minute before, have conceived that anyone could behave like that to him, Mitya Karamazov!” (p. 455). As seen in his thinking, the physical stripping is not enough to rid him of the self-seeking honor that he attaches to his own name.
As mentioned previously, the outside world finds Mitya’s honor absurd. When Mitya reveals the source of his self-laceration, Katerina’s money that he has kept in a pouch around his neck, the outside world laughs: “Both attorneys laughed aloud.” (p. 466) Mitya realizes there that the world is not the world of his own understanding, that the world is NOT Mitya: “Oh, God, you horrify me by not understanding!” (p. 466). The interrogation, physical stripping, and the attorney’s laughter strips Mitya of his self-laceration, strips Mitya of the walls that Mitya built around him that allowed him to say, “I’m not guilty! I’m not guilty of that blood! I’m not guilty of my father’s blood.... I meant to kill him. But I’m not guilty. Not I.” (p. 431). As Mitya’ sleeps, his self – the honorable “I” -- has been stripped away such that he is able to participate in a dream about suffering, about the communion of suffering, to feel the suffering of others that are not his self:
“And he felt also that a passion of pity, such as he had never known before, was rising in his heart, and he wanted to cry, that he wanted to do something for them all, so that the babe should weep no more, so that the dark-faced, dried-up mother would not weep, that no one should shed tears again from that moment, and he wanted to do it at once, regardless of all obstacles, with all the Karamazov recklessness.” (p. 479)
Even though Mitya in that dream wants to cure all suffering, the “Karamazov recklessness” and Grushenka’s voice in the dream assure that Mitya is really only one among the suffering, as seen when Mitya wakes up before his dream persona can do anything to help the babe. Mitya wakes up to his suffering – real suffering – and, unlike the rebellious Mitya before the dream, this Mitya looks toward his suffering “with a new light, as of a joy, in his face” and leaves Mokroe, asking for forgiveness and saying good-bye.
11 November 1999
Luke 18:17. “Amen, I say unto you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it.”
This piece of scripture entered my head when I first read about Ilyusha and Alyosha; it returned when I read Ivan’s dossier against God, with his newspaper clippings of tortured children. It also echoed my thoughts when read Mitya’s dream of the babe, the defense and prosecutor’s speeches of fathers and children, and finally Alyosha, the schoolboys, and the death of Ilyusha, at the end of the novel.
As seen in the novel, the lot of children is NOT a happy lot, is not a life filled with goodness and sweets and sunshine. The children in the novel are suffering children, proud children (like Kolya), neglected children (like the three Karamazov boys and Smerdyakov). Does God really want people to be like children, impotent, tortured, incapable of willing their own destiny?
But look at the adults of the novel: licentious Fyodor, self-lacerating Katerina, amoral Rakitin. Are not these adults just as impotent, tortured, incapable but just on a different level, a level of deceit in which they convince themselves that they are really free and thus can will their happiness?
The one person in the novel who seems to embody the childlike acceptance of God’s kingdom seems to be Father Zosima, and thus it is important that the reader sees Father Zosima’s life from childhood to young adulthood to mature adulthood to old age to death. The reader even sees Father Zosima after death (in Alyosha’s vision at the wedding at Cana), and one becomes aware of just what Christ meant when he meant “like a child.” A child, more than anything else, is a dependent being, aware of its impotence and need for others. A child is also a loving being, loving those upon whom it depends upon. What Father Zosima exhibit, and what Christ calls for in Luke, is that active loving despite the suffering of the world, despite his impotence to change the world, despite his own suffering. The child depends upon others for its survival, and all people need to depend upon each other for their survival. This acceptance of dependence upon others, this active loving upon others, even when that loving is difficult – especially when that loving is difficult – is what Christ’s mission was about and what Father Zosima’s life was also all about.
Christ lived among fallen Man, and he must have seen what children are capable of in their fallenness. Despite their fallenness – because of their fallenness – he came to them, and it is these fallen children – young and old – who will enter the kingdom of Heaven.
© 1999 Rufel F. Ramos