Another True, Correct Interpretation of Nietzsche

 

 

Another true, correct interpretation of Nietzsche is to see him as a Christian.  This is not my interpretation, but I have to admit, it works....

In my earlier essay, I traced a path through Nietzsche's thought that involved a sudden reversal - as I put it there, a "liberating, delightful punchline that explodes the entire shaggy dog story of Nietzsche's thought."  I went on: "Moreover, I believe that Nietzsche intended for his reader to have this experience, but also chose not to speak or write of it directly, merely hinting at it, more through what is left unwritten than that which is written, so that the reader could have the opportunity to come to this conclusion on her own. [...] Maybe Nietzsche knew that this experience cannot be had directly through reading - that it is in some sense transcendent, beyond the written page, unspeakable, ineffable, beyond language - that one must have it on one's own, in some ways against the reading."  

But what if you went even further?  What if you read Nietzsche even more ironically, as pointing more directly to the opposite of its superficial reading?  What if you read this philosopher who is billed as "the Antichrist" as a Christian?

Take Nietzsche's famous description of the Übermensch as a "Roman Caesar with the mind of Christ" (or "the soul of Christ" - Geist).  One could certainly easily understand this as a way of overcoming a binary opposition, of going "beyond good and evil," of attaining a kind of dynamic synthesis between the master morality and the slave morality, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, of the Kingdom of Heaven (pure bliss) and the will-to-power - or, more accurately, we could say, between two forms of the will-to-power: the will to conquer others and the will to overcome oneself.  That is certainly how I took it.  But couldn't one also, more simplistically, take this phrase more literally, to refer to the Pope?  Or the Vatican more generally?  Or perhaps to Constantine himself?  Or even, in a strange way, to Marcus Aurelius?  (This would involve interpreting Jesus as a kind of Stoic....)

In other words, this would involve seeing the fusion of the opposing forces as having already occurred, millennia ago.  That would mean, seeing the Übermensch as something in the far-off future, but something that developed in the past, and continues to develop, and will continue to develop, in myriad ways, producing countless branches and fruits.  That means, not a single Übermensch, towards which all of Nietzsche's thought is directed, but multiple paths of possible Übermenschen.  A genealogy of the Übermensch.  A tree of knowledge, a tree of life....

But if we are willing to read Nietzsche as a Christian, when he so obviously derided Christians so many times, why stop there?  He also derided democrats, socialists, anarchists.  Mightn't it be possible to read Nietzsche as a democrat?  As a socialist?  As an anarchist?  What if his philosophy is, in some subterranean way, an Affirmation of everything that it superficially seems to reject?

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