41. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 890-912

Faith: Christianity and Christendom (F.M. Dostoevsky); Deified Man (William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche) 

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F.M. Dostoevsky: Christ and the Grand Inquisitor


This great parable, interpolated into The Brothers Karamazov (1880), sets forth alternatives delineated in the introduction: "spiritual freedom or enslavement to the things of this world, religion or the disappearance of religion in a specious substitute." 


Christ has returned to Earth in the fifteenth century and has appeared "in Spain, in Seville, in the most terrible time of the Inquisition. So the Grand Inquisitor, "almost ninety, with a withered face and sunken eyes, in which there is still a gleam of light," has him arrested and goes to his cell to interrogate him. The Inquisitor accused Christ of returning "to hinder us," and assures him that he will be burned at the stake for doing so. Among other concerns of the Inquisitor is that by returning, Christ will be adding to the scriptural teachings, which challenges the authority of the Church. As Ivan, who is telling the story, explains to Alyosha, "it is the most fundamental feature of Roman Catholicism, in my opinion at least," that "'All has been given by Thee to the Pope ... and all, therefore, is still in the Pope's hands, and there is no need for Thee to come now at all.'" 


But most of all, by returning, Christ threatens to remind humankind of its freedom. It is the Church's desire to keep them faithful, to prevent them from challenging its authority. As the Inquisitor puts it, "For fifteen centuries we have been wrestling with Thy freedom, but now it is ended and over for good.... to-day, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet." 


The Inquisitor goes on to remind Christ of the three temptations offered him by Satan in the wilderness, "For in those three questions the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, brought together into one whole, and foretold, and in them are united all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature." 


The first temptation was for Christ to earn the undying loyalty of all humankind by turning stones into bread, thereby causing humanity to give up the "promise of freedom which men in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread -- for nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom." But because Christ refused this temptation, the Church was able to step in: 

Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever-sinful and ignoble race of man? ... No, we care for the weak, too. They are sinful and rebellious, but in the end they too will become obedient. They will marvel at us and look on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them.... We shall deceive them again, for we will not let Thee come to us again. That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie.

Humankind, says the Inquisitor, wants to worship something: "so long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it." This craving for a common object of worship for all humankind is the cause of a deadly discontent: "For the sake of common worship they've slain each other with the sword." 


So by rejecting the first temptation, Christ gave up the opportunity to unite humanity. "For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance." Christ's choice has caused humanity to suffer, the Inquisitor argues. 


The second temptation was to demonstrate his divinity by leaping from the high place and being rescued by the angels. As the Inquisitor points out, "There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness -- those forces are miracle, mystery and authority." Of course, the Inquisitor observes, Christ knew if he had yielded to the temptation, "in taking one step, in making one movement to cast Thyself down, Thou wouldst be tempting God and have lost all Thy faith in Him, and would have been dashed to pieces against that earth which Thou didst come to save." 


So Satan was pretty tricky in offering this temptation, not only because he knew Christ couldn't yield to it, but also because he knew that "man seeks not so much God as the miraculous. And as man cannot bear to be without the miraculous, he will create new miracles of his own for himself, and will worship deeds of sorcery and witchcraft." 


Then the Inquisitor appeals to Christ's awareness of the failure of his teachings: "fifteen centuries have passed" and "man is weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him!... by showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him." And so the Church has stepped in to correct Christ's mistake: "we have corrected Thy work and have founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority. And men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep, and that the terrible gift that had brought them such suffering was, at last, lifted from their hearts." 


And then the Inquisitor reveals what has been implicit all along: that the Church has been working with Satan, having accepted the third temptation -- worldly power -- that Christ rejected.

Perhaps it is Thy will to hear it from my lips. Listen, then. We are not working with Thee but with him -- that is our mystery. It's long -- eight centuries -- since we have been on his side and not on Thine. Just eight centuries ago we to from him what Thou didst reject with scorn, that last gift he offered thee, showing Thee all the kingdoms of the earth. We took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar, and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth, though hitherto we have not been able to complete our work.

The Inquisitor is astonished that Christ rejected the offer: "Thou wouldst have accomplished all that man seeks on earth -- that is, someone to worship, someone to keep his conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant-heat, for the craving for universal unity is the third and last anguish of men." He foresees the reaction to the challenges of post-Enlightenment modernity: 

Freedom, free thought and science will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves; others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and white to us: "Yes, you were right, you alone possess His mystery, and we come back to you, save us from ourselves!"

Cynically, the Inquisitor observes that the Church "will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves" and that "they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity." 


Alyosha is shocked by the implications of Ivan's story, but Ivan insists that the Inquisitor had followed the teachings of Christ "and made frenzied efforts to subdue his flesh to make himself free and perfect." But it was his love of humanity, Ivan says, that opened the Inquisitor's eyes, "and he saw that it is no great moral blessedness to attain perfection and freedom, if at the same time one gains the conviction that millions of God's creatures have been created as a mockery, that they will never be capable of using their freedom." 


"Your inquisitor does not believe in God, that's his secret!" Alyosha retorts. And Ivan admits the point. But that, he explains, is the Inquisitor's tragedy. Having recognized it, the Inquisitor chooses "the guarding of the mystery ... from the weak and the unhappy, so as to make them happy." 


And so he ends his parable with Christ, who has been silent through all the Inquisitor's harangue, kissing the Inquisitor "on his bloodless aged lips." The Inquisitor lets his prisoner go, and "The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea." 

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William Blake: God in Man


In these selections from "There Is No Natural Religion" (1788), "All Religions Are One" (1788) and "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (1790-93), Blake elevates imagination, as manifested in poetry and visionary prophecy, both of which were his forte, as divine revelation, setting imagination against science and reason. E.g., "If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again." 


Nature in itself is not a path to revelation, for humankind is bound by the limitations of its senses. Only imagination allows us to glimpse infinity, and "He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only." As for the pathway to revelation, "All deities reside in the human breast." Christ himself, Blake contends, was human, for he mocked the limitations on human freedom set down in Hebraic law: "did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbath's God? ... turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery?" He insists, "no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules." 

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Friedrich Nietzsche: The Death of God and the Antichrist  


Not content to be merely anti-clerical, in The Gay Science (1883) and The Antichrist (1895), Nietzsche explicitly rejected Christianity for its encouragement of human weakness. God is dead, proclaims Nietzsche's "madman" and the churches are God's "tombs and sepulchres." Zarathustra proclaims that this death prepares the way for the Superman, toward whom humankind will evolve if not fettered by a preoccupation with divinity: "everything shall be transformed into the humanly-conceivable, the humanly-evident, the humanly-palpable! You should follow your own senses to the end!" 


Humankind can't be "at home" in "the incomprehensible" or "the irrational," and should cease the "evil and misanthropic ... teaching about the one and the perfect and the unmoved and the sufficient and the intransitory." Instead, "the best images and parables should speak of time and becoming: they should be a eulogy and a justification of all transitoriness." The "creative will" should prevail, for "Creation ... is the great redemption from suffering, and life's easement." Belief in the gods frustrates creation -- "for what would there be to create if gods -- existed!"


Above all, humankind must reject weakness, and embrace "Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself." And that means rejecting Christianity as "more harmful than any vice."

Christianity has sided with all that is weak and base, with all failures; it has made an ideal of whatever contradicts the instinct of the strong life to preserve itself; it has corrupted the reason even of those strongest in spirit by teaching men to consider the supreme values of the spirit as something sinful, as something that leads into error -- as temptations.

Christian "pity" is nihilistic. It "negates life and renders it more deserving of negation." The Christian world view is a "world of pure fiction" that "is vastly inferior to the world of dreams insofar as the latter mirrors reality, whereas the former falsifies, devalues, and negates reality" by setting up nature as the opposite of or antagonistic to "God." 


To imagine god as good is "contrary to everything desirable. The evil god is needed no less than the good god: after all, we do not owe our own existence to tolerance and humanitarianism." The Judeo-Christian god is born of oppression: 

To be sure, when a people is perishing, when it feels how its faith in the future and its hope of freedom are waning irrevocably, when submission begins to appear to it as the prime necessity and it becomes aware of the virtues of the subjugated as the conditions of self-preservation, then its god has to change too. Now he becomes a sneak, timid and modest; he counsels "peace of soul," hate-no-more, forbearance, even "love" of friend and enemy.... Formerly, he represented a people, the strength of a people, everything aggressive and power-thirsty in the soul of a people; now he is merely the good god.

In Nietzsche's view, this reflects a decline in "the will to power" and therefore decadence. 

The Christian conception of God -- God as god of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit -- is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth. It may even represent the low-water mark in the descending development of divine types.... God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! God -- the formula for every slander against "this world," for every lie about the "beyond"! God -- the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness pronounced holy! 

37. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 803-828

Existence: Introduction; The Definition of Existence (Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche); Moments of Existence (Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre) 

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Søren Kierkegaard: The Individual and the Crowd


It's not much of a step from Dostoevsky's underground man to the existentialists. As the introduction notes, "many of the themes of the preceding section [Self] will recur: an opposition of individual and society; an inner division of particularity and universality; temporal emergence; the struggle for authenticity; and a troubled assertion of freedom." But existentialism "has a psychological subtlety and a sense of urgency that are its own. The distinctive existentially vocabulary -- turning on such categories as being, absurdity, choice, dread, despair, commitment -- is like a situational survey or map courageously drawn at a moment of supreme crisis." 


In The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1859), Kierkegaard stresses the subjectivity that becomes central to existentialism, though from the point of view of a Christian. Taking as his text St. Paul's assertion, "only one attains the goal," he proclaims that truth is a matter of individual perception, not that of the group to which one belongs: "a 'crowd' is the untruth ... by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction." Even if the "crowd" is unanimous in its choice, the will to act is an individual one: "For 'crowd' is an abstraction and has no hands:  but each individual has ordinarily two hands." It is that individual's choice to use those hands that is significant, for the individual may choose to follow the crowd or not to follow it. 


Søren Kierkegaard: Concrete Existence and Abstract System 


In Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1844), Kierkegaard emphasizes process rather than dogma, citing Lessing's assertion that if God offered him a choice between the truth and the pursuit of truth, he would choose the pursuit. In fact, Kierkegaard says, we are not presented with the choice at all. There are many who proclaim that they have a "System" that is the truth, but they're lying: they assert "that the System is almost finished, or at least under construction, and will be finished by next Sunday." He admits, "I shall be as willing as the next man to fall down in worship before the System, if only I can manage to set eyes upon it." But despite promises of its imminent completion, no one has produced it yet. 


"System and finality are pretty much one and the same, so much so that if the system is not finished, there is no system." And "a fragment of a system is nonsense.... A persistent striving to realize a system is on the other hand still a striving; and a striving, aye, a persistent striving, is precisely what Lessing talks about." Instead of systems, we get false advertising, like that of the man who advertised that he had lost a cotton umbrella because if he had told the truth, that it was silk, the person who found it would be more likely to keep it rather than return it. 

So also thinks, in all probability, the systematist: "If on the title-page and in the announcements I call my production a persistent striving for the truth, alas! who will buy it or admire me? But if i call it the System, the Absolute System, everyone will surely want to buy the System."

The "existing individual [is] a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal situated in existence." But because abstract thought deals with eternal verities, it fails to take into account the plight of the human being who stands at the intersection of time and eternity: "the difficulty inherent in existence constitutes the interest of the existing individual, who is infinitely interested in existing." So "an abstract thinker is a duplex being: a fantastic creature who moves in the pure being of abstract thought, and on the other hand, a sometimes pitiful professorial figure which the former deposits, about as when one sets down a walking stick." 


The problem arises when one tries to think of "the eternal as in process of becoming." It's compounded by the fact that "the thinker himself is in process of becoming. It is easier to indulge in abstract thought than it is to exist." The Greeks regarded "a thinker [as] an existing individual stimulated by his reflection to a passionate enthusiasm." And the early Christians regarded the thinker as "a believer who strove enthusiastically to understand himself in the existence of faith. If anything of this sort held true of the thinkers of our own age, the enterprise of pure thought would have led to one suicide after another. For suicide is the only tolerable existential consequence of pure thought." Thus Kierkegaard anticipates by about a century Camus's famous assertion that the only real philosophical question is that of suicide. "Nowadays a thinker is a curious creature who during certain hours of the day exhibits a very remarkable ingenuity, but has otherwise nothing in common with a human being."




Friedrich Nietzsche: The Free Thinker and the Consensus


In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche also asserts that truth is a matter of individual and subjective judgment: "One must get rid of the bad taste of wishing to agree with many others" and especially not be a slave "of democratic taste and its 'modern ideas,'" especially the "inclination to see the cause for all human misery and failure in the structure of society as it has been up to now" and the desire for "the universal green pasture-happiness of the herd: security, lack of danger, comfort and alleviation of life for everyone." He sneers at "equal rights" and "compassion for all that suffers," and rejects the idea that suffering is "something that must be abolished." Suffering is what toughens us up, and leads to "the advancement of the species." 




Friedrich Nietzsche: Subjective Will and Objective Truth


In another excerpt from Beyond Good and Evil and one from The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche rejects objectivity: "The objective man is indeed a mirror; above all he is something that wishes to be recognized and understood; he is accustomed to subordination, devoid of any pleasure other than that afforded by cognition, by 'mirroring.'" As a consequence, he knows nothing about himself: "Whatever 'person' is left in him seems accidental to him, often arbitrary, even more often disturbing." In the end, "he places himself at too remote a point to side with either good or evil." Nietzsche scathingly runs through the insipid and ineffectual character of the "objective man," and concludes, wickedly, "he is usually a man without substance or content, a 'self-less' man. Hence, not a man for women either (parenthetically remarked)." 


Moving less satirically and more pointedly into the realm of metaphysics, Nietzsche takes aim at the seekers of truth, whose claim to objectivity is an attempt to conceal their biases, conscious or unconscious: "the largest part of conscious thinking must be consider an instinctual activity, even in the case of philosophical thinking." The philosopher's own instincts guide and color his conclusions: "Even behind logic and its apparent sovereignty of development stand value judgments, or, to speak more plainly, physiological demands for preserving a certain type of life." 


Beneath the supposedly rational judgment of every philosopher lies "a pre-conceived dogma, a notion, an 'institution,' or mostly a heart's desire, made abstract and refined, ... defended by them with arguments sought after the fact." He mocks "The spectacle of old Kant's Tartuffery, as stiff as it is respectable, luring us onto the dialectical crooked paths which lead (or better, mislead) to his 'categorical imperative.'" Nietzsche asserts that "every great philosophy up to now has been ... the personal confession of its originator, a type of involuntary and unaware memoirs.... Each individual desire wants badly to represent itself as the final aim of existence and as rightful master of all the others." 


Over against the "man of theory, ... working in the service of science," the traditional ideal  embodied by Socrates, Nietzsche sets the man of action. He reminds us that the "Alexandrian culture" that makes the philosopher and the scientist the paragon "requires a slave class for its continued existence, but in its optimism it denies the necessity for such a class." And Kant (now back in Nietzsche's good graces) and Schopenhauer have demonstrated that the Enlightenment "optimism [that] treated the universe as knowable, in the presumption of eternal truths, and space, time, and causality as absolute and universally valid laws ... serve only to raise appearance ... to the status of true reality, thereby rendering impossible a genuine understanding of that reality." The challenges to the optimists and the objective thinkers have been shaken to the core. "The man of theory, having begun to dread the consequences of his views, no longer dares commit himself freely to the icy flood of existence but runs nervously up and down the bank."




Albert Camus: The Fact of Absurdity 

Albert Camus in 1957

Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) familiarized us with the "absurd," that moment of recognition that meaning does not necessarily inhere in our daily activities. When we respond to "the impulse of consciousness," and question why we do what we do, "At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery." Camus concludes that this is for the good: "For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it.... Mere 'anxiety,' as Heidegger says, is at the source of everything." 


We grow up thinking of the future as a time when things will begin to take shape for us, and we will understand what we have been preparing for. "Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty  Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in time." Consciousness reveals to him that "after all, it's a matter of dying." And he recognize that while "he was longing for tomorrow, ... everything in him ought to reject it." He has experienced the absurd. 


Or we realize that the world is alien to us. "At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very moment lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them.... that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd." The absurd is also found in those moments when we confront ourselves in a mirror or a photograph and find ourselves alien. And when we contemplate our own mortality, and the fact that "everyone lives as if no one 'knew'" that they were going to die. "This is because in reality there is no experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced by what has been lived and made conscious." 


The "giddy whirling" that the mind experiences in contemplating logical paradoxes leads us to the truism: "All thought is anthropomorphic." When we recognize that the world cannot be reduced to human terms, we experience the absurd. "If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would be reconciled." But of course it doesn't. And if we try to assert that we are one with the universe, "we fall into the ridiculous contradiction of a mind that asserts total unity and proves by its very assertion its own difference and the diversity it claimed to resolve."

It is essential to consider as a constant point of reference in this essay the regular hiatus between what we fancy we know and what we really know, practical assent and simulated ignorance which allows us to live with ideas which, if we truly put them to the test, ought to upset our whole life.

For the only thing we can know is our existence and our sensory contact with the world. "There ends my knowledge, and the rest is construction.... Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled." Theory can present us possible models of the world and the laws that govern it, but not certitude: 

But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.... So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art.... I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.

"Hence the intelligence, too, tells me in its way that this world is absurd," though in fact what is absurd is not the world but our attempts to apprehend it: "the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart." The absurd is the only link between man and the world. "It binds them one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together." 




Jean-Paul Sartre: Existence Precedes Essence 

Jean-Paul Sartre, c. 1950

In Existentialism and Humanism (1946) Sartre sets out to explain that central tenet of existentialism, "existence precedes essence." He starts with a paper-knife (something that people used to use before books came with their pages trimmed). A craftsman has the specs for the paper-knife and he knows what it's to be used for. Its essence precedes its existence. And then there's God, who creates man the same way that the artisan creates the paper knife: following a pattern and knowing what man is to be used for. "Thus each individual man is the realization of a certain conception which dwells in the divine understanding." 


The Enlightenment eliminated God from the process, while still retaining the idea of natural law, of man as filling a certain function in the universe. "Man possesses a human nature; that 'human nature,' which is the conception of human being, is found in every man, which means that each man is a particular example of a universal conception." Again, man's essence precedes his existence. 


But existentialism, at least the kind espoused by Sartre, rejects the existence of God. And in this view of man, he exists without any prior conception of what his function in nature, he "surges up in the world -- and defines himself afterwards.

Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself already existing -- as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.

35. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 754-779

Self-Consciousness: The Divided Self (Friedrich Nietzsche, W.B. Yeats); Freedom (Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche)

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Friedrich Nietzsche: The Masks of Truth 


"Everything deep loves masks; the deepest things have a veritable hatred of image and likeness." Thus spoke Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (1886). The mask is the face that the self presents to the world, and it is essential to the artist and the philosopher. It is not a mask necessarily a mask assumed by them, but one that grows out of their relationship to the world: "around every deep thinker a mask constantly grows, thanks to the continually wrong, i.e. superficial, interpretations of his every word, his every step, his every sign of life." 


Humankind fears the truth and takes refuge in superficialities: 

It is deep, suspicious fear of incurable pessimism that forces whole millenniums to sink their teeth into a religious interpretation of life. It is that fearful instinct which intuits that man might come into possession of the truth too soon, before he has grown strong enough, hard enough, artist enough. Looked at in this light, piety, "living in God," would appear to be the subtlest and ultimate product of the fear of truth.

We put on the mask to "become so much a work of art, of surface, of color-play, and goodness, that one no longer suffers whenever one looks at" us, and "one writes books in order to conceal what is concealed in one."  

Every philosophy is a foreground-philosophy.... There is something arbitrary in the fact that the philosopher stopped here, that he looked back and looked around, that here he refrained from digging deeper, that he laid aside his spade.... Each philosophy also conceals a philosophy; each opinion is also a hiding place; each word is also a mask.... Man, a complex, lying, artificial, and inscrutable animal ... has invented the clear conscience, so that he might have the sensation, for once, that his psyche is a simple thing. All of morality is a continuous courageous forgery, without which an enjoyment of the sight of man's soul would be impossible.

W.B. Yeats: The Anti-Self 


Yeats's masks, described in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918), are also a product of the artist's  self-concealment, as well as a spontaneous expression of characteristics of the artist that he or she chooses to suppress. Yeats is aware that his public self is not the one that he finds when he closes the door to his study and sits down to write. "When I come to put in rhyme what I have found it will be a hard toil, but for a moment I believe I have found myself and not my anti-self. It is only the shrinking from toil perhaps that convinces me that I have been no more myself than is the cat the medicinal grass it is eating in the garden." The anti-self protects the self, just as the grass nourishes and heals the cat.


He sees this in the work of his friends, such as the woman (possibly Augusta Gregory) whose "only fault is a habit of harsh judgement with those who do not have her sympathy," but whose plays are anything but harsh and judging. Or the actress who plays meek and self-effacing young women on stage but "in private life is like the captain of some buccaneer ship holding his crew to good behavior at the mouth of a blunderbuss." Even the art she collects is a mask of her private self: 

When I last saw her in her own house she lived in a torrent of words and movements, she could not listen, and all about her upon the walls were women drawn by Burne-Jones in his latest period ... women who were always listening, and are as necessary to her as a contemplative Buddha to a Japanese Samurai.   

He also contrasts the "gentle and silent" John Millington Synge with the "voluble dare-devils" of his plays: "in all his imagination he delights in fine physical life. And "William Morris, a happy, busy, most irascible man, described dim colour and pensive emotion." Yeats posits that "the work is the man's flight from his entire horoscope." Keats, who was "ignorant, poor, and in poor health, and not perfectly well-bred," in his poetry indulged in "imaginary delights" and "gave us his dream of luxury." Dante "celebrated the most pure lady poet ever sung and the Divine Justice," but "had to struggle in his own heart with his unjust anger and his lust." 


Which leads Yeats to one of his best-known prose aphorisms: "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric; but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." Not everyone achieves this ability to express the anti-self: "The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality." It comes from struggle: "He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer." 


So Yeats dismisses the contemporary "doctrine of sincerity and self-realisation." It has "made us gentle and passive," when what is needed is "the energy to assume the mask of some other life."

If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are, and try to assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon ourselves though we may accept one from others.... Wordsworth, great poet though he be, is so often flat and heavy partly because his moral sense, being a discipline he had not created, a mere obedience, has no theatrical element.

Yeats, tinkering with spiritualism, posits the role of a classical daemon in the artist's life: 

the Daemon comes not as like to like but seeking its own opposite, for man and Daemon feed the hunger in one another's hearts. Because the ghost is simple, the man heterogeneous and confused, they are but knit together when the man has found a mask whose lineaments permit the expression of all the man most lacks, and it may be dreads, and of that only.

Finally, Yeats confronts contemporary psychology: "The doctors of medicine have discovered that certain dreams of the night, for I do not grant them all, are the day's unfulfilled desire, and that our terror of desires condemned by the conscience has distorted and disturbed our dreams." Artists have no need of dreams to do this for them. They have their masks. 




Arthur Schopenhauer: Sympathy and Asceticism


Asceticism, the denial of the body in order to come closer to the spirit, has been the traditional way of dealing with dualism in almost all cultures. For the modern, it is a path toward self-knowledge, toward freeing the self from physical demands. Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Idea (1818) deals with it in terms of the individual will attempting to separate itself from the universal will. 

If that veil of Mâyâ, the principle of individuation, is lifted from the eyes of a man to such an extent that he no longer makes the egotistical distinction between his person and that of others, but takes as much interest in the sufferings of other individuals as his own, and therefore is not only benevolent in the highest degree, but even ready to sacrifice his own individuality whenever such a sacrifice will save a number of other persons, then it clearly follows that such a man, who recognises in all beings his own inmost and true self, must also regard the infinite suffering of all suffering beings as his own, and take on himself the pain of the whole world.

This cognition of wholeness, of the "constant passing away, vain striving, inward conflict, and continual suffering," is contrasted by Schopenhauer with "the principle of individuation" and "egoism" that only knows particular things and their relation to his own person." By turning away from the ego, "Man ... attains to the state of voluntary renunciation, resignation, and perfect will-lessness." But the process is difficult: "Therefore Jesus says, 'It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.'" The things of the world call to us. "Asceticism ... shows itself ... in voluntary and intentional poverty." 


This "mortification of will" is the rejection of "the source of his own suffering existence and that of the world." For "so long as the body lives, the whole will to live exists potentially, and constantly strives to become actual, and to burn again with all its ardour." But silencing "all volition, gives the deepest peace and opens the door of freedom." Those who attain this state "strive with all their might to keep upon this path, by enforced renunciation of every kind, by penance and severity of life, and by selecting whatever is disagreeable to them, all in order to suppress the will, which is constantly springing up anew." 




Friedrich Nietzsche: Self-Overcoming 


A keen student of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche also embraced a form of asceticism, but as a means of rising above the herd mentality and "slave morality" of humanity. "Man is something that should be overcome," he had Zarathustra proclaim in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), in order to make way for the Übermensch. (The usual translation, "Superman," has comic connotations that are unfortunately unavoidable.) Just as we mock our simian ancestors, so the Superman toward which we should be evolving will mock us. "All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves," he argues, so man must evolve into Superman. 


And forget about becoming something higher in an afterlife: "I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hopes! ... Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy, but God died, and thereupon these blasphemers died too. To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence, and to esteem the bowels of the Inscrutable more highly than the meaning of the earth." (He has already defined "the meaning of the earth" as the Superman.) 


The path to the Superman is an ascetic one, because the soul, which was once upon a time "lean, monstrous, and famished" has become "poverty and dirt and a miserable ease," and as a result "man is a polluted river." To become Superman, man must contemn happiness, reason, virtue, justice and pity. The wise man must learn the "will to power": "You want to create the world before which you can kneel: this is your ultimate hope and intoxication." The "will to power" is "the unexhausted, procreating life-will." 


Existence is by nature a struggle, and life is "that which must overcome itself again and again." All creatures, Nietzsche asserts, wish to obey but also to command those weaker than themselves, but "commanding is more difficult than obeying ... because the commander bears the burden of all who obey, and ... this burden can easily crush him." 

The strange fact ... is that everything of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and craftsmanlike certainty that one can find on earth, whether it applies to thinking, or ruling, or speaking, or persuading -- in the arts as well as in codes of conduct -- would never have developed save through "the tyranny of ... arbitrary laws." Indeed, the probability is strong that this is "nature" and "natural." 

In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche stresses again the necessity of obedience. He appeals to history to show that "violence, arbitrariness, rigor, gruesomeness and antirationality turned out to be the means for disciplining the European spirit into strength, ruthless inquisitiveness, and subtle flexibility," although the same time "much which is irreplaceable in energy and spirit was suppressed, choked out, and ruined in this same process." But cruelty is a necessity on the way to "everything that we call 'superior culture.'" 

What constitutes the painful delight of tragedy is cruelty; what is pleasurable in so-called tragic pity, and basically in everything sublime right up to the highest and subtest thrills of metaphysics, gets its sweetness from nothing other than the added ingredient of cruelty.... Naturally we must get rid of the old ridiculous psychology which knew no better than to teach that cruelty only arises at the sight of someone else's suffering. There is a rich, an over-rich pleasure in one's own suffering, in making oneself suffer.

Which brings us back to Schopenhauer's asceticism. 


Nietzsche also proclaims the necessity of aristocracy: "Every heightening of the type 'man' hitherto has been the work of an aristocratic society -- and thus it will always be; a society which believes in a long ladder of rank order and value differences in men, which needs slavery in some sense." This, Nietzsche posits, is the only way in which man can attain "a higher level of being." Naturally, he also acknowledges that aristocracies come and go, and that they decline and decay. Egalitarianism may be "proper behavior," but as "the basic principle of society, it shows itself for what it is: the will to negate life, the principle of dissolution and decay." For life "is essential assimilation, injury, violation of the foreign and the weaker, suppression, hardness, the forcing of one's own forms upon something else, ingestion and -- at least in its mildest form -- exploitation." This last, in the evolutionary process, "belongs to the nature of living things, it is a basic organic function, a consequence of the will to power which is the will to life."


In all higher cultures, Nietzsche says, there is an attempt to mediate between "master-morality and slave-morality." The former is the definition of the "good" as those qualities "which are felt to be what excels and determines the order of rank" in society. "What is despised is the coward, the timid man, and the petty man, he who thinks in terms of narrow utility; likewise the suspicious man with his cowed look, the one who humiliates himself, the dog-type who lets himself be mistreated, the begging flatterer, and above all the liar: it is the basic faith of all aristocrats that the common people are liars." The master "feels himself as value-determining; ... he knows that he is the something which gives honor to objects; he creates values." 


Slave-morality is that which makes "existence easier for the sufferers: here compassion, the complaisant helping hand, the warm heart, patience diligence, humility and friendliness are honored, for these are the useful qualities and almost the only means for enduring the pressure of existence. Slave-morality is essentially a utility-morality."

Here is the cornerstone for the origin of that famous Antithesis "good vs. evil." Power and dangerousness, a certain frightfulness, subtlety and strength which do not permit of despisal, are felt to belong to evil. Hence according to slave morality, the "evil" man inspires fear; according to master morality, the "good" man does and wants to, whereas the "bad" man is felt to be despicable.

25. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 539-558

The Unconscious: Introduction; Unreason and Reason (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Blake, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche)

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The Demoniac

As the editors' introduction says, in the movement of thought leading up to Freud's creation of psychoanalysis, "The traditional primacy of ideas over feeling, purpose over instinct, reason over energy, is ... questioned and often repudiated." In this selection from Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life (a very clunky translation of the title Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, 1811-1822), Goethe examines the sense of something in nature that "was not godlike, for it seemed unreasonable; not human, for it had no understanding; nor devilish, for it was beneficent; nor angelic, for it often betrayed a malicious pleasure." He calls it the "Demoniac, after the example of the ancients," and notes that he has observed it in certain individuals who seem to possess "a tremendous energy"and to "exercise a wonderful power over all creatures."

Seldom if ever do the great men of an age find their equals among their contemporaries, and they are to be overcome by nothing but by the universe itself; and it is from observaton of this fact, that the strange but most striking proverb must have risen, Nemo contra Deum nisi Deus ipse.

No one can oppose a god if he isn't a god himself.


William Blake: Energy and Reason

 

Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (1793) accepts what Goethe calls the Demoniac as an essential creative principle, and anticipates Nietzsche's dualism of Apollonian and Dionysian. Hell is energy, and Heaven is reason, to oversimplify. And as Blake asserts, "Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two." 

Arthur Schopenhauer: Will and Knowledge

In The World as Will and Idea (1818), Schopenhauer represents the traditional view as an assertion that human beings possess a soul that is primarily a vehicle for knowledge, and that from this knowledge humans learn that certain things are good. They then apply the secondary power of will to seek that which is good. This is, he says, "a reversal of the true relation." The will is the primary force: "Will is first and original; knowledge is merely added to it as an instrument belonging to the phenomenon of will."

What the man really and in general wills, the striving of his inmost nature, and the end he pursues in accordance with it, this we can never change by influence upon him from without by instruction, otherwise we could transform him.

The best we can do through moral instruction is to "teach the will that it erred in the means it employed and can therefore bring it about that the end after which it strives ... shall be pursued on an entirely different path and in an entirely different object from what has hitherto been the case. But it can never bring about that the will shall will something actually different from what it has hitherto willed."

The individual human is a finite being "in infinite space and time, and consequently ... a vanishing quantity compared with them." We exist "only in the present, whose unchecked flight into the past is a constant transition into death, a constant dying." In physical terms, just as "walking is ... merely a constantly prevented falling," bodily existence "is only a constantly prevented dying." And mental activity "is a constantly deferred ennui."

We pursue our life, however, with great interest and much solicitude as long as possible, as we blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although we know that it will burst.

Because frustration of the will produces pain, and "too easy satisfaction" of what it desires produces only "a terrible void and ennui," life is a continual oscillation "between pain and ennui." The religious portrayal of hell as a place of constant pain, therefore, leaves "nothing over for heaven but ennui."

The body itself "is nothing but the objectified will to live." And the human being "stands upon the earth ... uncertain about everything except his own need and misery." For the mass of humanity, life is a constant struggle for existence, "with the certainty of losing it at last. But what enables them to endure this wearisome battle is not so much the love of life as the fear of death, which yet stands in the background as inevitable, and may come upon them at any moment."


Friedrich Nietzsche: Dionysos and Apollo

In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche posits a duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysiac -- roughly a dichotomy of reason and order vs. passion and chaos -- that, like Blake's Heaven and Hell, marry and beget "Attic tragedy, which exhibits the salient features of both parents." He compares the states of "dream and intoxication, two physiological phenomena standing toward one another in much the same relationship as the Apollonian and Dionysiac."

The person who is responsive to the stimuli of art behaves toward the reality of dream much the way the philosopher behaves toward the reality of existence: he observes exactly and enjoys his observations, for it is by these images that he interprets life, by these processes that he rehearses it. Nor is it by pleasant images alone that such plausible connections are made: the who divine comedy of life, including its somber aspects, its sudden balkings, impish accidents, anxious expectations, moves past him, not quite like a shadow play -- yet never without giving a fleeting sense of illusion.

Apollo was both the god of light and the soothsayer, and as the bearer of truths represents both the dream state and art, which are closely related. Apollo's "looks and gestures radiate the full delight, wisdom, and beauty of 'illusion.'"

The Dionysiac "rapture, whose closest analogy is furnished by physical intoxication," brings about the bond between individual human beings and between humanity and nature.

If one were to convert Beethoven's "Paean to Joy" into a painting, and refuse to curb the imagination when that multitude prostrates itself reverently in the dust, one might form some apprehension of the Dionysiac ritual. Now the slave emerges as a freeman; all the rigid, hostile walls which either necessity or despotism has erected between men are shattered.... He feels himself to be godlike and strides with the same elation and ecstasy as the gods he has seen in his dreams.

Nietzsche goes on to interpret the choral finale of Beethoven's Ninth as an expression of Dionysiac rapture, quoting the line from the Schiller poem set by Beethoven: "Do you fall on your knees, multitudes, do you divine your creator?" (Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen? Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?)

Nietzsche asserts that the cult of Dionysus was prevalent elsewhere in the ancient world but was held in check in Greece by "the proud, imposing image of Apollo, who in holding up the head of the Gorgon to those brutal and grotesque Dionysiac forces subdued them. Doric art has immortalized Apollo's majestic rejection of all license."

Apollo's music was a Doric architecture of sound -- of barely hinted sounds such as are proper to the cithara. Those very elements which characterize Dionysiac music and, after it, music quite generally: the heart-shaking power of tone, the uniform stream of melody, the incomparable resources of harmony -- all these elements had been carefully kept at a distance as being inconsistent with the Apollonian norm.

Do I need to interject here that classical scholars dismiss Nietzsche's account of Greek art and religion as pure fantasy? But Nietzsche was not really interested in presenting a factual account of ancient history, any more than Blake was describing a literal marriage of Heaven and Hell. Apollo represents for him the Olympian attitude, with Dionysos as an expression of Goethe's Demoniac force. "The same drive that found its most complete representation in Apollo generated the whole Olympian world, and in this sense we may consider Apollo the father of that world.... Nothing in these deities reminds us of asceticism, high intellect, or duty: we are confronted by luxuriant, triumphant existence, which deifies the good and the bad indifferently."

He tells the story of King Midas, who asked Silenus, the companion and (in one version of the myth) the tutor of Dionysos, "what he considered man's greatest good." Silenus responded:

"Ephemeral wretch, begotten by accident and toil, why do you force me to tell you what it would be your greatest boon not to hear? What would be best for you is quite beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best is to die soon."

That makes Schopenhauer sound cheerful. Nietzsche sees the Olympian gods as a projection of human beings, "keenly aware of the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to be able to live at all they had to place before them the shining fantasy of the Olympians." The same religion-as-fantasy impulse also gave rise to art "as a completion and consummation of existence." As for the gods, they "justified human life by living it themselves -- the only satisfactory theodicy ever invented." (The same impetus to project human existence into divinity also gives rise to the Christian idea of the Incarnation, of God become Man.) 

With the example of the immortal gods before them, "Now it became possible to stand the wisdom of Silenus on its head and proclaim that it was the worst evil for man to die soon, and second worst for him to die at all." Thus human heroes, a little bit lower than the gods, appeared in the poetry of Homer.

It should have become apparent by now that the harmony with nature which we late-comers regard with such nostalgia, and for which Schiller has coined the cant term naïve, is by no means a simple and inevitable condition to be found at the gateway to every culture, a kind of paradise.... The naïveté of Homer must be viewed as a complete victory of Apollonian illusion.... In the case of the Greeks it was the will wishing to behold itself in the transcendence of genius; but in order so to behold itself its creatures had to view themselves as glorious, to transpose themselves to a higher sphere, without having that sphere of pure contemplation either challenge them or upbraid them with insufficiency. It was in that sphere of beauty that the Greeks saw the Olympians as their mirror images; it was by means of that esthetic mirror that the Greek will opposed suffering and the somber wisdom of suffering which always accompanies artistic talent.

Humans have "an intense longing for illusion" and our dreams "appear to us as illusions of illusions, hence as a still higher form of satisfaction of the original desire for illusion." Nietzsche turns here to a later artist, Raphael, and his painting of the Transfiguration.

He finds in it "that reduction of illusion to further illusion which is the original act of the naïve artist and at the same time of all Apollonian culture." In the lower half of the painting we have confusion ("the helpless, terrified disciples")  and pain ("the possessed boy") -- "íllusion' here is a reflection of eternal contradiction, begetter of all things. From this illusion there arises, like the fragrance of ambrosia, a new illusory world, invisible to those enmeshed in the first; a radiant vision of pure delight, a rapt seeing through wide-open eyes. Here we have, in a great symbol of art, both the fair world of Apollo and its substratum, the terrible wisdom of Silenus, and we can comprehend intuitively how they mutually require one another."

The Apollonian attitude "demands self-control" and produces maxims like "Know thyself" and "Nothing too much." Consequently, "the Dionysiac spirit struck the Apollonian Greeks as titanic and barbaric." But antithetical forces must coexist. And out of their coexistence comes the tragic vision, producing "the sublime and much lauded achievement of the dramatic dithyramb and Attic tragedy, as the common goal of both urges; whose mysterious marriage, after long discord, ennobled itself with such a child, at once Antigone and Cassandra."

In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche returned to the Apollonian and Dionysian, but in a more prophetic, less explanatory vein, reporting the conversation of a devotee with Dionysus:

Once, for example, he said "I love mankind under certain conditions" (alluding to Ariadne who was there at the time), "man seems to me to be a pleasant, courageous, inventive animal who has not his likes on earth; he can find his way around any labyrinth. I wish him well; I often contemplate how I might advance him, how I might make him stronger, more evil, and deeper than he is." "Stronger, more evil, and deeper?" I asked, shocked. "Yes," he said once more, "stronger, more evil, deeper, and also -- more beautiful!" -- and saying this he smiled his halcyon smile, this Tempter-God, as though he had delivered himself of an endearing courtesy. One sees at once that it is not only modesty which this divinity lacks.... There are good reasons, in fact, for supposing that all the gods could learn from us men in several respects. We man are more -- humane....