This is why, as we have seen, in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant was willing to stake his entire reputation on the existence of humanitas elsewhere in the Cosmos.
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SERPENT POWER OF THE SUPERMAN
In The Anti-Christ, Friedrich Nietzsche recognizes
the spirit of Science as the antithesis of the Christian
mentality. Christianity, in Nietzsche’s view, extols foolish
ignorance and condemns the “wisdom of this world” as
sinful. In fact, as Nietzsche recognizes, the Bible begins with the
story of a jealous god who is terrified at the human attainment of
knowledge of life, of Nature, as symbolized by the Serpent and by
the serpentine woman, Eve ( Hava), whose Hebrew name means
“life.” The advocate of Science strives in the spirit of the Antichrist as the mortal enemy of God:
A religion like Christianity, which is at no point in contact with
actuality, which crumbles away as soon as actuality comes into
its own at any point whatever, must natural y be a mortal enemy
of the ‘wisdom of the world’, that is to say of science…
Paul wants to confound the ‘wisdom of the world’: his enemies
are the good philologists and physicians of the Alexandrian
school – upon them he makes war. In fact, one is not philologist
and physician without also being at the same time anti-Christian.
…Has the famous story which stands at the beginning of the
Bible real y been understood – the story of God’s mortal terror
of science? …God had created for himself a rival, science makes
equal to God… Moral: science is forbidden in itself – it alone is
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forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sins, original
sin. This alone constitutes morality. – ‘Thou shalt not know’ –
the rest follows. …all thoughts are bad thoughts. Man shall not
think. …Distress does not allow man to think. …And none the
less! Oh horror! The structure of knowledge towers up, heaven-
storming, reaching for the divine – what to do! – The old God
invents war, he divides the peoples, he makes men destroy one
another… War – among other things a great mischief-maker in
science! – Incredible! Knowledge, emancipation from the priest,
increases in spite of wars. – And the old God comes to a final
decision: ‘Man has become scientific – there is nothing for it, he
will have to be drowned!’1
In The Anti-Christ Nietzsche identifies the Jewish mentality as an epitome of the falsification of life that one sees in the conception
of the Fall as a rightful punishment for the sin of knowledge-
seeking that was committed in Eden. This is reiterated in The Birth of Tragedy. Given that the Promethea trilogy of Aeschylus was a supreme work of the tragic age of the Greeks that Nietzsche so
admired, and that becomes the subject of The Birth of Tragedy, it ought to be no surprise that we find his most extended meditation
on Prometheus there. He contrasts the Prometheus mythos of the
Āryans with Semitic religiosity in the most striking terms. The
passages deserve quoting at length:
Let me now contrast the glory of activity, which il uminates
Aeschylus’ Prometheus, with the glory of passivity… Man, rising
to Titanic stature, gains culture by his own efforts and forces
the gods to enter into an alliance with him because in his very
own wisdom he holds their existence and their limitations in his
hands. But what is most wonderful in this Promethean poem,
which in its basic idea is the veritable hymn of impiety, is the
profoundly Aeschylean demand for justice. The immeasurable
suffering of the bold “individual” on the one hand and the divine
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 175–177.
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predicament and intimation of a twilight of the gods on the
other…
In view of the astonishing audacity with which Aeschylus places the
Olympian world on the scales of his justice, we must call to mind
that the profound Greek possessed an immovably firm foundation
moods could be vented against the Olympians. The Greek artist,
in particular, had an obscure feeling of mutual dependence when
it came to the gods, and precisely in the Prometheus of Aeschylus
this feeling is symbolized. In himself the Titanic artist found the
defiant faith that he had the ability to create men and at least destroy Olympian gods, by means of his superior wisdom which, to be sure,
he had to atone for with eternal suffering. The splendid “ability” of
the great genius for which even eternal suffering is a slight price, the stern pride of the artist – that is the content and soul of Aeschylus’
poem…
But Aeschylus’ interpretation of the myth does not exhaust the
astounding depth of its terror. Rather the artist’s delight in what
becomes, the cheerfulness of artistic creation that defies all
misfortune, is merely a bright image of clouds and sky mirrored
in a black lake of sadness. The Prometheus story is an original
possession of the entire Āryan community of peoples and
evidences their gift for the profoundly tragic. Indeed, it does
not seem improbable that this myth has the same characteristic
significance for the Āryan character which the myth of the
fall has for the Semitic character, and that these two myths are
related to each other like brother and sister. The presupposition
of the Prometheus myth is to be found in the extravagant value
which a naïve humanity attached to fire as the true pal adium
of every ascending culture. But that man should freely dispose
of fire without receiving it as a present from heaven, either as
a lightning bolt or as the warming rays of the sun, struck these
reflective primitive men as sacrilege, as a robbery of divine
nature. Thus the very first philosophical problem immediately
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produces a painful and irresolvable contradiction between man
and god and moves it before the gate of every culture, like a huge
boulder. The best and highest possession mankind can acquire
is obtained by sacrilege and must be paid for with consequences
which involve the whole flood of sufferings and sorrows with
which the offended divinities have to afflict the nobly aspiring
race of men. This is a harsh idea which, by the dignity it confers
on sacrilege, contrasts strangely with the Semitic myth of the
fall in which curiosity, mendacious deception, susceptibility to
seduction, lust – in short, a series of pre-eminently feminine
affects was considered the origin of evil. What distinguishes
the Āryan notion is the sublime view of active sin as the
characteristical y Promethean virtue. With that, the ethical
basis for pessimistic tragedy has been found: the justification of
human evil, meaning both human guilt and the human suffering
it entails.
…Whoever understands this innermost kernel of the Prometheus
story – namely, the necessity of sacrilege imposed u
pon the
titanical y striving individual… [who, like] the swelling… tide…
takes the separate little wave-mountains of individuals on its
back, even as Prometheus’ brother, the Titan Atlas, does with the
earth. This Titanic impulse to become, as it were, the Atlas for all
individuals, carrying them on a broad back, higher and higher,
farther and farther, is what the Promethean and the Dionysian
have in common.2
Returning to The Anti-Christ, there Nietzsche observes how the Church links the Christian embrace of ignorance as bliss with an
affirmation of submissive weakness. As a world-historical force,
Christianity has made war on the rare and higher type of person who
seeks knowledge and worldly wisdom above all else. Nietzsche, who
was by profession a classicist, sees the classical world as having, after 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Random House, 2000), 71–73.
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scientific orientation towards life were already developed.
Of course, this was in the context of an aristocratic society more
closely aligned with the natural distinction between three types of
‘human’ being: 1) a miniscule elite who lives for knowledge; 2) a
small but significant minority who are the guardians of knowledge
insofar as they recognize the superiority of the first type and have
the physical strength and spiritual discipline to serve them as a
knightly class; 3) the vast mediocre majority who, unless they are
riled up by rabble rousers that instill false expectations in them, are ready, willing, and able to function as “intelligent machines.” With
respect to the first two of these castes, Nietzsche observes that Jesus as “the redeemer” is the antithesis of the type of the genius and hero.
In Nietzsche’s view these three castes of soul ought to be arranged in a pyramidal structure.
While this was not exactly the case in the actual society of the
classical world, the ideal of a scientific society – as most famously
exemplified by Plato’s Republic – was at least recognized by many
of the thinkers of the classical world, going all the way back to
the Pythagorean Order. These men and women were amassing
institutional power in cities such as Alexandria.
Since the destruction of the classical academies, scientific
geniuses and heroic spirits have been viciously persecuted and
inquisitorial y tortured as something intolerably lower than what the
Hindus call Chandala – those that they tolerate as “untouchables.”
The harbingers of the Superman have been associated with
everything Evil. In Nietzsche’s view, it is now time for a reversal of this grotesque Christian inversion of a rightful ethical order wherein those with the strength to boldly seek wisdom and knowledge
are recognized as sovereign. He intends for the true Chandala to
retake their rightful place as robots that build a broad foundation
for the self-directed evolution of the intellectual elite beyond the
merely ‘human’ and into a superhuman condition. Whoever said
3 Nietzsche,
The Anti-Christ, 175.
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that interdependence entailed equality had no sense of relations in
nature or the evolutionary force of life.
In The Gay Science and The Will to Power, Nietzsche elaborates on this interdependence of the “last man” and the Promethean “masters
of the earth.” There he sees the transformation of the teeming rabble
into a machine as a platform on which a new nobility of renaissance
men erect a new world order unifying Science, Art, and Politics:
So many things have to come together for scientific thinking to
originate... Their effect was that of poisons... Many hecatombs of
human beings were sacrificed before these impulses learned to
comprehend their coexistence and to feel they were all functions
of one organizing force... artistic energies and the practical
wisdom of life will join with scientific thinking to form a higher
organic system in relation to which scholars, physicians, artists,
and legislators – as we know them at present – would have to
look like paltry relics of ancient times.4
…Inexorably, hesitantly, terrible as fate, the great task and
question is approaching: how shall the earth as a whole be
governed? And to what end shall “man” as a whole – and no
longer as a people, a race – be raised and trained?5
...as the consumption of man and mankind becomes more
and more economical and the “machinery” of interests and
services is integrated ever more intricately, a counter-movement
is inevitable... the production of a synthetic, summarizing,
justifying man for whose existence this transformation of
mankind into a machine is a precondition, as a base on which
he can invent... this higher form of aristocracy… that of the
future… a hothouse for strange and choice plants.6
Despite the brilliant insight and evocative imagery of such passages,
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 173.
5 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Random House, 1968), 501.
6 Ibid., 463–464, 478.
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Nietzsche fails to live up to his own-most insights regarding the
primacy of the dynamic force of becoming. The doctrine of eternal
recurrence, if interpreted ontological y as Nietzsche himself
interprets it when he occasional y denies free will despite the
essential thrust of his thinking, is a doctrine developed under the
influence of Spinoza – one wherein it is still possible to take a view sub specie aeternitatis in light of which what appears as a becoming driven by desire is real y a bounded nexus of possibilities always already inherent in Being and, consequently, one that is fated to
repeat itself in its actualization within the frame of finite Time.
The north Indian Tantric understanding of Shakti or “Power”, if taken radical y and without compromise with traditional forms of
Hindu thought, is more Nietzschean than Nietzsche in the sense
that it adheres to his insight that ‘Reality’ is perspectival through
and through so that it is impossible to gain a vantage-point on the
creative force of becoming. We are presented with a view of the
world as the will to power or of Reality as Wirklichkeit – in just the sense that Nietzsche meant this: that power is not a positive state
but a dynamic relationship defined in terms of otherness and self-
transcending desire, and that the “truth” is what works within this deferent and differentiating play of forces.7 For Tantric devotees of
Shakti, just as for Nietzsche, the human condition is something to be
overcome – it is a transitional state between the bestial and a form of life beyond the gods who no longer deserve to be set up as something
above ourselves.8 Yet, even in terms of this convergence, the Tantric
conception of the Superman is more faithful to Nietzsche’s deepest
insights than he is.
Nietzsche goes on at great length, especial y in The Will to Pow
er, regarding the undemocratic and radical y aristocratic character of
the Supermen and their coming world order. He sees technological
development as transforming the majority of mere humanity into a
machinery whose productive power will serve as a foundation upon
which those artist-philosophers who have cultivated themselves in
7 Julius Evola, The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way, 20, 22.
8 Ibid., 16.
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a superior fashion will be able to erect a higher culture devoted to
bold exploration and discovery.9 Nietzsche no doubt sees Eugenics
as a means of discipline and breeding that has a different effect
from merely instrumental leveling technologies, but is this – when
taken together with the cultivation of intellect, valor, and taste –
sufficient to define a class of beings that act as a countercurrent to the historical unfolding of nihilism at its culmination?
Modern technology, based as it is on a mechanistic metaphysics
of Nature grasped in terms of equations that equalize all things as
variables, is inherently democratic: anyone can use a telephone or
ride a train in order to col apse distances and the medium or the
conveyance is neutral with respect to what is being conveyed.10
Even Eugenics could be used by a so-called Social Democracy to
‘enhance’ an entire population. As Julius Evola recognizes in The
Yoga of Power, the same cannot be said of the siddhis or superpowers cultivated by the Tantric practitioner. Materialistic modern science
prides itself on the power of the mechanistic technology supposedly
engineered on the basis of its theoretical discoveries, and takes these feats of engineering to be the ultimate validation of its theoretical
models – to such an extent that these are viewed as a mirror of
structures inherent in Nature.11 However, if modern man were to be
stripped of his technology on account of some natural catastrophe
– or perhaps through a catastrophe attendant to his own supposed
technological empowerment, for example, a nuclear war – he would
be reduced to a condition more desperate, feeble, and helpless than
that of any of the great predators in the wilderness.12
From this it can be gleaned that machine technology has
atrophied the human being rather than catalyzed an overcoming of
the merely human condition. But there is a techne – a craft, technique, or technology (in the classical sense) – that can place any mechanical 9 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Random House, 1968), 463–