Nietzsche's attack on God and gods in "Upon the Blessed Isles"

This is part of an ongoing series of blog posts on what I call "aesthetic atheism."  You can see the other posts by using the index function on my blog site.  

In "Upon the Blessed Isles" Zarathustra begins by observing to his disciples that his teachings are like ripe figs that are falling to them and that, in this autumn period, it is "beautiful to look out upon distant seas" i.e. upon that which transcends ordinary experience. Before, people mentioned "God" when they looked out onto such seas, but now it is "overman."  So it is clear that "overman" is to replace "God."  This is followed by a series of aphorism that mainly begin with the line: "God is a conjecture."  This reminds us that God is a hypothesis, not an established reality, a hypothesis set up to serve a purpose.

In the first, Zarathustra encourages his disciples not to conjecture beyond their creative wills.  Since they could not create a god, they should not speak to him of any gods.  But they could create the overman, or recreate themselves as fathers or grandfathers of the overman.  

In the second, he encourages his disciples to limit their conjectures to the thinkable, and, he observes, they could not "think a god." What is "thinkable for man" really can be, from his materialist perspective, no other than what is visible to or even feelable by man.  Previous attempts to think God only seemed to be successful insofar as they denied that our cognitive faculties are faculties of our body.  Instead, "You should think through your own senses to their consequences."  The main consequence of the fact that we access the world through our senses is that immaterial entities make no sense (at least not as an explanation for creativity).  Since we cannot get beyond our bodies we cannot think a being without body, particularly one that has all of the other traditional attributes of God, i.e. all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, creator of universe. Traditional believers also often say we cannot think God, since we are finite and God is infinite.  Nietzsche and they are in accord about this, except he would go further.  

The next paragraph seems to advocate a kind of idealism:  "And what you have called world, that shall be created only by you." However this is not a Berkeleyan idealism.  Rather, it is one that says:  the world we experience is the one we deal with and this world can be approached in different ways.  One way could be life- affirming, and this way would recognize that whatever we experience is based on our interpretations.  We may be unconscious of this, but when we become conscious of it we recognize that our reason, image, will and love is "realized."  It is so realized when and if we approach this process in an affirmative way. 

Nietzsche refers to the seeker here as a "lover of knowledge":  such a lover creates his/her world in the sense of constructing that world under his/her interpretation, and in a positive way for her "bliss."  It is only through having this hope, i.e. of an affirmative creation/interpretation of one's world, that the lover of knowledge (the philosopher) can "bear life."  The alternative would be a hopeless world that is "incomprehensible" or "irrational."  

The next passage is the most famous.  Zarathustra provides us with an argument against the existence of gods!  But he initiates this proof not by emphasizing its rationality but by insisting that he is revealing his heart entirely to his friends.  This is the argument. (Admittedly it will appear at first quite bizarre, but it needs to be understood in terms of the rest of the chapter!)  

"if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god!  Hence there are no gods."  The premise indicates that Zarathustra (and presumably all "free spirits" and "noble" individuals) could not endure not being a god if there were indeed gods.  Why?  Because there would be a limit to his accomplishment, his creativity.  We will see from later passages that the problem with the existence of God or god is not envy so much as limitation of one's creative powers.  A god is someone who creates a world.  God even more so is the only creator, so the hypotheses goes, of our world. Remember that in the last paragraph we found that hope for a philosopher only exists in being able to create his/her own world through his/her body, will, and senses, and under his/her own interpretation.

But what about the inference:  "Hence there are no gods"?  The intervening premises must be something like:  (1) human creativity would be impossible if there were gods, and (2) it is obvious that human creativity exists, for example that Nietzsche is creating a book titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  So let us then consider the first premise.

In Plato's Ion creativity is understood as coming through divine inspiration of a dramatic sort.  When the poet is inspired, God is literally speaking through his or her mouth.  If God existed then this would be the only path for creativity:  so there would be no real human creativity. As Feuerbach and Marx observed, traditional believers project their human creativity onto God, and then worship something human in this imagined entity.  (Yes, Nietzsche and Marx are in the same boat on this one.)  It is better to recognize our own creativity in ourselves than in God.  The inference can be drawn that there are no gods from the very fact of human creativity; it is we who create worlds.  Of course we do not create the literal physical world but we do create the worlds we experience or the world as we experience it, not God or the gods. (The explanation of the origins of the physical world can be left to science.)  Moreover, when I draw this conclusion, the conclusion can "draw me":  i.e. I can now be shaped by this recognition.  Thus the God conjectured, once thoroughly understood, would entail either great agony or death, i.e. death as a creative individual.  And if you take faith in his own creative powers away from the creative individual then he might as well be dead.

The problem is elaborated in the next paragraph:  the idea of "God" makes everything crooked since it denies the reality of impermanence.  Nietzsche talks about this thought as sending him into a "dizzy whirl" and making him vomit. The idea is simply that any positing of the One (as in Parmenides and Plotinus) and the Permanent (as in traditional views of God) is sickening when not seen as a parable, and even then, it is not as good a parable for man as those that allow for time and becoming.  These later are denied by these thinkers of permanence. So the problem with the existence of God is that it fails to praise and justify the impermanence needed for creativity. But why is impermanence needed.  See below. 

The main reason for religion is redemption from suffering. Nietzsche is not opposed to redemption or even to religion. Zarathustra says, "Creation -  that is the great redemption of suffering."  But the mistake is to think that the creation in question is that of God or gods.  First and fundamentally creation needs not only change and becoming, which cannot come from an unchanging god, but also suffering.  You are not going to get any creation without suffering:  all creative artists, philosophers, scientists know that.  So why speak of God, who cannot suffer, as a creator?  "To be a child who is newly born, the creator must also want to be a mother who gives birth and the pans of the birth-giver."  If you want the birth you will the pains.

Nietzsche follows this with a passage that could easily be misunderstood as advocating a theory of reincarnation.  It does not, and it cannot.  Actually the paragraph is a preview of the doctrine of eternal recurrence and its fundamental connection with the doctrine of will to power.  Zarathustra says:  "Verily, through a hundred souls I have already passed on my way, and through a hundred cradles and birth pangs."  The idea connects with the previous paragraph:  the birth pangs in the creative process happen again and again with the writing of each book, the painting of each painting. We are not talking about afterlives but about this life.   "But thus my creative will, my destiny, wills it" says Zarathustra, which simply means that my will to power is my will to create even through the pangs that go with the creative process.  

In the next paragraph Zarathustra insists that my will (when it wills in this creative way) liberates me from my suffering and, in doing so, brings joy.  To will in this instance simply means to create. Thus if we could neither will nor value nor create any more we could only feel "great weariness."  This is not only true in the arts but also in the pursuit of knowledge, as Nietzsche realizes.  There is innocence in my knowledge, says Zarathustra, because "the will to beget is in it":  i.e. my knowledge (the knowledge gained by the Nietzschean free spirit) is not knowledge if it is just a reflection, it is fresh and innocent only insofar as it creates:  it does not just discover, it also produces at the same time.  In conclusion then, Zarathustra asserts that his creative will lured him away from God and gods and asks rhetorically: "what could one create if gods existed?"  The answer is nothing.  This comment rounds out the argument.  Once I recognize that it is I and not God or gods that create then I need no longer believe in them:  moreover, I could not create anything if God was the creator.  Either God or me.  But my creativity is obvious to me, God's is a mere conjecture.

So my will to create is directed toward man as the sculptor's hammer to a stone, creating, like Michelangelo, the image that sleeps in the stone.  This image is "the image of my images" in that, in creating myself, I create myself as a creator.  And, as Nietzsche constantly reminds us, the images I create and also reveal sleep in the "hardest, the ugliest stone."  They come out of  passions and drives that "the good" cannot approve.  Damage may result from the creative process and yet in the effort to perfect man (or man in myself) the beauty of the overman is present as a shadow, and this, in all of its possibility and potential, replaces God and the gods.  

Aesthetic atheism does not reject religion but finds a successor concept to religion in the idea of man (man and woman, of course) as creator both of great works, of worlds, but also of him/herself.  It finds redemption in this.  

Nietzsche Birth of Tragedy Section 9 The Genius and Sacrilege

Section 9 of the Birth of Tragedy is mainly about the value of a certain kind of sacrilege, the sacrificial sacrilege needed to achieve Dionysian wisdom, or any sort of deeper wisdom.  It is all described in terms of the ancient Greeks and their myths, in terms of battles between various groups of Gods, particularly between the Titans and the Olympians, and yet, as always, N. has in mind something more contemporary.  The significance of this section for the project of the book as a whole can be seen in the fact that the title page of the book features Prometheus unchained.  So part of the question here is the significance of Prometheus for N.  It gets pretty complicated since N. does not just identify Prometheus with the Dionysian, although the Titan is closer to that than to the Apollonian.  Ultimately Prometheus is seen as having both sides.

The significance of this for today, in N.s view, would be in terms of the price paid by the genius (whether artistic or philosophical). Such a person must violate "natural law" (or what is conceived as such) in order to achieve something real.  In this section the natural law is symbolized by, in Oedipus Rex, the rules against incest and patricide, and the violation of those rules. Quite possibly (well, quite probably) N. identifies himself both with Prometheus, as hero of Aeschylean tragedy, and Oedipus, as hero of Sophoclean tragedy.  We get here the beginnings of a critique of morality not simply of the Christian sort, but of morality itself (by which he mainly means, the conventional and traditional, especially the Alexandrian, which is really the Appolinian without the Dionysian).  

But the best way to think of this is to ponder N. the rebel academic, the violator of his philological scholarly parents.  Then you have this idea that in order to really do something, in philosophy for example, or in German culture as a whole, or perhaps for humanity itself, one must commit sacrilege (i.e. break the idols, which means, for example, taking on Kant and even Socrates), and that the consequent suffering is just part of it.  

His main thought is to get behind the dialogue and the character of the hero in tragedy, all of which is clear and precise in an Apollinian way, and get to the myth which is projected as the bright image of the hero, an image which simply stands out on the wall of the cave (read Plato's cave, but with reality not outside in the sun and the world of the Forms, but deeper inside the cave in the Schopenhauerian depths of the wisdom of Silenus) as a healing image against the background of the abyss.  The mask of the hero (on stage) has two aspects: the Apollinian and the Dionysian, the second related to the gruesome terrors of nature.  And what of the much vaunted Greek cheerfulness?  Well, if there is any it is due to this contrast, the same one that was described in terms of the Greek response to the wisdom of Silenus mentioned earlier.

It is odd that, for N., Oedipus not only suffers due to his errors and wisdom but also "spreads a magical power of blessing" that continues beyond his death, since even if the entire moral world is destroyed by his actions, he magically founds a new world on the ruins of the old.  This is a two stage process, following the two great Sophoclean plays. The cheerfulness evident in Oedipus Rex through our pleasure in the hero's solving of the mystery of the Theban plague, a cheerfulness that softens the edges of the king's personal tragedy, is heightened, infinitely says N., in Oedipus at Colonus, where the king's suffering faces an unearthly cheerfulness in which the hero's passiveness is itself the highest form of activity, and we are overcome by a "profound human joy" as a counterpart to dialectic (a clear reference again to Plato's methodology and how it does not work in regard to these deepest of questions).  

Yet, the play itself, "the poet's whole conception," is nothing but a bright healing image projected to save us from our perception of the abyss.  The question N. then raises is how Oedipus can be both the violator of custom and also solver of the riddle of the Sphinx, a riddle which represents the deepest wisdom about man.  The clue is to be found in the "popular belief" that the wise man is born from incest, i.e. he gains "prophetic and magical powers" that "break the spell of present and future," i.e. the spell of convention by way of an act of sacrilege.  He must "compel nature to surrender her secrets" by means of something unnatural.  Dionysian wisdom is the result of an "unnatural abomination" by which the hero plunges nature into destruction and then suffers his own dissolution as a result.  Wisdom of this sort, is "a crime against nature."  

And no one before N. has ever said something like that, although perhaps he is right that the Greek tragedians implied it. No one has ever associated wisdom with sacrilege.  And think about the cost N. himself will pay life for his radical questioning, for his own sacrilege.    

In short, we do not have here the death of God but rather a joyous defiance of God, something shared by Prometheus and the philosophical or artistic genius: "Man, rising to Titanic stature [Prometheus was a Titan], gains culture by his own efforts and forces the gods into an alliance with him because in his very own wisdom he holds their existence and their limitations in his hands." Man can kill the gods, or bring them alive again.  

N., as always, sees this in terms of stages.  In this case the Aeschylean tragedy poses the bold individual against the gods in decline, the two reconciled by the mediation of Moira, Fate, who stands above both men and gods.  So Aeschylus, himself audacious like Prometheus, places both God and men on the same scales (i.e. of justice), this based on the Greek capacity to use "mysteries" (generally associated with the Dionysian) to ground metaphysical thought and to counter the dominance of the Olympians.  

The Greek poet recognizes that the gods depend on him as much as he on them.  For N., the death of God is the destruction of God by the individual foretold by the myth of Prometheus creating men to overcome the gods and then suffering eternally as a result.  But, where Aeschylus ends with a story of eternal suffering, Sophocles tells a higher story that ends with "the holy man's song of triumph" a Nietzschean yes to life.  Aeschylus is Schopenhauer to Nietzsche's Sophocles.  Thus, Aeschylus's "interpretation of the myth" is one-upped by that of Sophocles.  

The artist's image again is just "a bright image of clouds and sky mirrored in a black lake of sadness" -- the abyss. Prometheus brings fire to man and this is the crucible for the ascent of culture insofar as man uses it, not as a present from heaven, but as something he has robbed from the gods.  This battle, this "irresolvable contradiction between man and god" is the origins of culture. Myth, one might say, hides, but also reveals, this contradiction.  

N. compares this idea to the idea of the Jews and Christians (he calls it Semitic myth), the idea of sin whereby, in his view, various feminine qualities give rise to evil.  The Aryan (by which he means Greek and German) idea of "active sin" as Promethean virtue provides the "ethical basis" for Greek tragedy:  in this case human evil is justified, along with guilt and resultant suffering.  (I think "evil" for N. mainly means not cruel acts against others but violations of conventional limits based on systematic application of a skeptical methodology.)

So, at the heart of things, there is a contradiction between the divine and the human, each having right on its side as an individual, but suffering nonetheless, the individual hero trying to transcend his individuation to become, in a Schopenhauerian way, "one world being."  

Not important to me is N.s identification of sacrilege with the Aryan and the masculine and sin with the Semitic and feminine, but simply the idea that the "titanically striving individual" is no follower of Apollo since Apollo draws boundaries by way of his Socratic, and ultimately Alexandrian, demand for self-knowledge and moderation, i.e. self-knowledge only by way of moderation and limitation, i.e. logical tidiness.  This is the scholarly ideal too: philosopher as definer in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, for example. 

Nietzsche then combines the Titanic and the Dionysian: "The Titanic impulse to become, as it were, the Atlas [brother of Prometheus] for all individuals, carrying them on a broad back, higher and higher [as Zarathustra does for his friends?], farther and farther, is what the Promethean and the Dionysian have in common."  So, Prometheus "is a Dionysian mask" and the demand for justice is just his Apollinian side.  

The end of the section is a riddle that sums it up:   "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." i.e. we have moved "beyond good and evil" as N. later puts it.  N. follows this with "This is your world!  A world indeed! ---"  a quote from Faust. To say yes to your world, a wondrous world, one needs to see just and unjust as equally justified, something I cannot personally go along with.  But the idea of the necessity of sacrilege and a battle between men, allied with Titan gods, and the Olympian gods (representing what N. called the Socratic but also the tradition of Plato's Forms and all attempts as self-knowledge through logic, boxing in, limitation of sort) haunts.