(Originally published in the October 1984 issue of New Libertarian, pgs. 22-3.)
Borges has a story about an early 20th Century French writer who, by a
tremendous effort of concentration, managed to re-create a few chapters of Don
Quixote. These hard-won pages of Renaissance Spanish irony, Borges points
out, are in all respects identical with the same pages in Cervantes' original,
but are much richer and more complex, simply because we know they
are the work of a French intellectual contemporary with Freud and Lenin and
Einstein.
Of course, we might - almost - be able to find the same meanings in Cervantes
himself (since his text is identical with that of Borges' imaginary Frenchman).
But we could only do this and see Cervantes in that perspective if we first
managed to brainwash ourselves and forget everything we know about Cervantes
himself and the times in which he lived.
I have recently been trying to recreate Nietzsche in that way. Less heroic, or
less demented, than Borges' hero, I haven't actually tried to clone chapters or
even pages from the original German text, but just to read Nietzsche again as
if I had never read him before, and as if he had lived my life along with me
and was, in some sense, my psychological twin brother.
I see, from this perspective, that Nietzsche was very heavily influenced by the
psychedelic revolution of the 1960s and also has read a great deal of Logical
Positivism, General Semantics, Ethnomethodology and Sociobiology. He is, in
fact, one of the best educated and most scientifically hip writers of the
1980s. I am also happy to note that he is a Discordian and a neo-pagan, just
like me.
Thus, Nietzsche's concept of Chaos makes perfect sense to me, as the natural
conclusion of anybody who has experimented with LSD and also kept up with
recent sociology and anthropology. Those who read Nietzsche before the 1980s,
not understanding his warning that he would be born posthumously, could
not comprehend this aspect of his philosophy. Chaos sounded nihilistic to them,
and they did not understand how he could accept Chaos in one breath and
denounce nihilism in the next; naturally, they accused him of being
self-contradictory.
Actually, it is quite clear, now, that what Nietzsche meant by Chaos was not
entropy - as if he believed the universe had already reached its theoretical
Heat Death - but rather the infinite diversity of existence. There is not one
principle that can explain this infinite diversity, he held, for the same reason
that there is no Platonic Form or Kantian ding an sich behind it all. It
is too rich and abundant to be nailed down under a formula. Becoming is
real, but being is only a grammatical convention created by the
subject-predicate structure of Indo-European languages. This is a much more
elegant expression, I think, than Heidegger's "existence precedes
essence."
Nietzsche's analysis of the Will to Power shows equal semantic sophistication
and neurological knowhow. The Will to Power is not the first principle of the
world, he says specifically; "first principles" are just attenuated
forms of "God" or Platonic idealism. The Will is not even a thing in
the vernacular sense or in the Kantian ding an sich sense; the Will is
just a description. When analyzed, he points out, it always resolves into the
resultant of various other forces, and we are back to Chaos again - the
evolutionary becoming which replaces all static Aristotelian categories
in Nietzsche's post-Darwinian universe.
When one transcends conditioned social-game consciousness and internalized
grammatical conventions - whether with LSD or via meditation and yoga, or by
whatever method - one experiences the dissolution of "real space,"
"real time," and "real bodies" "moving" in this
"real space and real time," etc. The Buddhists seem to be
pretty hip in saying that if you regard what remains as One (the Hindic Atman, etc.),
you have not gone far enough. If you go far enough, they say, you will see that
the One also implodes, and only Void remains. That is all good enough, for
c.400 B.C., but the void never seemed quite the right metaphor to me. I think
Nietzsche is more contemporary by saying that what remains is Chaos, infinite
meaning in infinite flux, and Will to Power, the spirit of abundance and creativity,
which is not One, not a final principle or a God-in-disguise, but just the
resultant of the forces that make up the mesh of Chaos.
The existentialists know that we create ourselves, but Nietzsche knows, like
the sages of the Consciousness Movement, that we create our world, too.
("We are all better artists than we realize," as he phrases it in one
place.) The Will to Power, either functioning unconsciously [when we still
believe in "real space," "real time," and "real
objects"] or else functioning consciously [when we have experienced Chaos
and learned that space, time and objects are just mind-constructs] always
determines what reality-tunnel we are living in. The artist is Nietzsche's
model of the conscious Will to Power because he or she knows that he or
she creates an appearance, an illusion, an ordering of the infinite flux. It
almost sounds as if Nietzsche has been reading Don Juan (or Carlos Castaneda;
or Harold Garfinkle, who was Castaneda's sociology teacher and the possible
original of Don Juan.)
Chaos, then, is Nietzsche's poetic shorthand for the recognition that the
universe is infinite Becoming rather than static Being; and the Will to Power
is the resultant of all forces tending to creativity, innovation and the sheer
joy of imposing one's own meaning on this universal flux. Thus, Nietzsche's
notorious "I could only believe in a god who dances" and his attacks
on "the spirit of gravity" are both expressions of the fundamental
insight that we can not only survive the Death of God (the Absolute) but
enjoy it. The existentialist experiences the collapse of the absolute,
shudders, decides the universe is meaningless, and determines to be brave and
impose a meaning on life anyway. Nietzsche experiences the collapse, laughs
joyously, decides the universe contains all possible meanings, and tells us to
pick the meaning that will liberate our own Will to Power most totally.
In a sense, the existentialists' nihilism (no meaning) and Nietzsche's Chaos
(all possible meanings) are logically similar; and both are heavily
influenced by the world of scientific materialism out of which they grew. But
Nietzsche and the existentialists are at opposite poles psycho-logically.
You can see it in their styles. The existentialists whine, mutter and complain.
Nietzsche laughs, jokes, flashes with wit and capers like a clown.
It is this Nietzschean humor (especially his sarcasm) that contains his
ultimate "message." The famous, or infamous, Nietzschean
"style," the vertigo of brilliant aphorisms and almost childish puns,
is not at all a surface or an accident. The aim of his work, he tells us
several times, is to destroy the rationalization of the Revenge motive, to lay
bare every hidden resentment in every philosophy that provides justifications
for intolerance and hatred. His bitter (but hilarious) onslaughts on dogmatic
Christianity and Socialism are not just attacks on one specific religion and
one specific political party, but are analytical paradigms showing how the
Revenge motive can disguise itself as altruism, charity, humanitarianism and
even as progress. To understand Nietzsche's wit, his habit of sarcasm,
is to understand the essence of his system of psychology. We are released from
Revenge, he obviously feels, only when we see deeply enough into its disguises
to laugh at them. A style that dances and plays with ideas is the only style to
convey that perspective, the view (as Nietzsche said) from the mountaintops,
looking down at human passions.
To live in the Nietzschean multi-varied universe, to pick one's own values out
of infinite possibilities, seems like painful choice to the existentialist,
blasphemy to the Christian, monstrosity to the Objectivist; but it is actually
only to become consciously an artist. All art begins with Chaos, with
infinite vistas suddenly opening, and proceeds through play and permutation
into new Creativity (the sublimated Will to Power, Nietzsche calls it) -
going from the ridiculous to the sublime, as it were.
Or as Nietzsche sums it up in one lightning-like sentence, "One must have
Chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star."
The Overman (who has nothing in common with the Nazi vulgarization of
Nietzsche) is he or she who contains enough Chaos to give birth to stars. Less
poetically, it is he or she who, having reached the mountaintop and looked down
at primate psychology, neither weeps nor despairs but laughs. Again, there is
no understanding Nietzsche without accepting his humor as fundamental. H.L.
Mencken, often regarded as another vulgarizer of Nietzsche by Certain
Authorities in Academia, may have understood the ultimate Nietzsche best of
all. Mencken, at least, also wrote very funny books; whereas those who write
more "profoundly" about Nietzsche while still possessed by that
spirit of gravity he despised, seems not to have understood him at all. ---RAW