The Field of Nietzschean Interpretation

Extended and Expanded

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Philosophy is still trying to make sense of what it means to inhabit a post-Nietzschean universe, over a century after he left his mark.  In this article, I want to deepen and complexify how we understand the possibility space for post-Nietzschean philosophy.  This deepening and complexification is not a final, complete, or exhaustive list of great thinkers who have been variously influenced by Nietzsche, but rather a potentially useful tool to improve the way we think about Nietzsche today, and explore the different types of conversations which are possible.  I will present the list of thinkers who I think have both engaged Nietzsche, and also had an outsized impact on the history of philosophy, as well as end with some core thinkers who have thought Nietzsche through Philosophy Portal.¹

The List:

(1.1) Sigmund Freud:

Sigmund Freud famously claimed that he didn’t read Nietzsche because he didn’t want to bias his discoveries in psychoanalysis with the intuition of the great philosopher:²  

“What [Schopenhauer] says about the struggle against accepting a distressing piece of reality coincides with my concept of repression so completely that once again I owe the chance of making a discovery to my not being well-read.  Yet others have read the passage and passed it by without making this discovery, and perhaps the same would have happened to me if in my young days I had had more taste for reading philosophical works.  In later years I have denied myself the very great pleasure of reading the works of Nietzsche, with the deliberate object of not being hampered in working out the impressions received in psycho-analysis by any sort of anticipatory ideas.  I had therefore to be prepared — and I am so, gladly — to forgo all claims to priority in the many instances in which laborious psycho-analytic investigation can merely confirm the truths which the philosopher recognised by intuition.”

Nevertheless, in this same statement, Freud himself implies that Nietzsche is a precursor to the field of psychoanalysis.  In Nietzsche, we already find concepts related to the unconscious psyche as constituting much human society, repression as a mechanism splitting subjectivity from within, libidinal drives as related to true motivation, and dreams as containing personal life-meaning, as well as being part of a cathartic truth process.  We also can’t ignore the fact that both Freud and Nietzsche share a basic deconstructive metaphysics: both are critical of normative morality, Christianity as the metaphysical foundation for society, and find a deeper truth in dimensions of the psyche that are often not even thought of before psychoanalysis.  Considering these similarities, it could actually be accurate if we, following Freud’s suggestion that Nietzsche discovered by intuitive vision and poetic expression, what was also systematically embodied by psychoanalysis via rational inquiry of the unconscious.

(1.2) Martin Heidegger:

The connections between Nietzsche’s work and Martin Heidegger’s work are too extensive and profound to really summarise in a single paragraph.  Nevertheless there are some absolutely crucial points to contact that are helpful for brief reflection, if only as an entry-point for deeper study into Heidegger’s engagement with Nietzsche.  Perhaps the most important of these points of contact is the philosophy of perspectivism, which suggests that classical metaphysical objectivity is strictly speaking, impossible.  However, both Nietzsche and Heidegger agree that a type of objectivity within perspectivism, is possible, depending on the particular value or end towards which a being is oriented by power (i.e. being-towards-x?).  This is why Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche focus on the will to power as both knowledge and metaphysics:³  

“Who Nietzsche is and above all who he will be we shall know as soon as we are able to think the thought that he gave shape to in the phrase “the will to power”.  Nietzsche is that thinker who trod the path of thought to “the will to power”. [...] Nietzsche belongs among the essential thinkers.  With the term thinker we name those exceptional human beings who are destined to think one single thought, a thought that is always “about” beings as a whole.  Each thinker thinks only one single thought.”

In the largest and most profound possible context, classical objectivity functioned as a truth to defend us against the truth of the will to power.  Here classical objectivity should be understood as a supra-sensory ground and goal of all reality throughout much of Western history: the goal of the Idea for Plato, and God for Christianity.  For Heidegger, the loss of this ground signals the potential end of society based on an unconscious other-worldly metaphysics, but also a potential beginning (i.e. what will be) for a truer understanding of thinking objectivity.  From this Heideggerian perspective, we can interpret much of what Nietzschean philosophy offers us as, not objective facts, but rather hypotheses that are meant to burden us in introducing us to a new historical orientation.

(1.3) George Bataille:

Nietzsche also had an outsized impact on the thought of George Bataille, who saw Nietzsche as ending the possibility for traditional religious belief in a monotheistic God who knows everything and exists in a separate world.  Bataille also saw Nietzsche as opening the possibility for new idiosyncratic forms of godless mysticism hitherto unknown in the world.  These new forms of mysticism, Bataille proposed, should be explored in spiritual life outside of religious institutions, and may be found by thinking through abstraction as confessional (i.e. what we speak/write is a confession of our depths):⁴ 

“Motivating this writing — as I see it — is fear of going crazy.”

As well as erotic life as theological (i.e. how we use/direct our sexuality as our “God”):⁵ 

“I’m on fire with painful longings, persisting in me like unsatisfied desire.”

Like a lightning flash of Nietzschean madness, both of these moves point us away from the use of traditional narratives, like the Christian metaphysics, in order to satiate the impossibility of our own being; but also point us away from the traditional use of narratives as such, to obfuscate tarrying with this impossibility.  For Bataille, what these moves affirm is the conditions of possibility for allowing us to say what has never been said before, or even what cannot be said.  In the words of Bataille himself:⁶

“The object I refer to is incommensurable.”

(1.4) René Girard:

For René Girard, his approach to Nietzsche is both deconstructive and personal.  Girard focuses more on the way Nietzsche’s own personal relationships were marked by the emotional force of resentment, which he equates to “playing with fire”.  He cites evidence that Nietzsche’s life was structured or overdetermined by mimetic (ideational) rivalries for greatness.  Richard Wagner is perhaps the greatest example of these rivalries.  Thus Nietzsche is presented as a historical person who ultimately struggled with madness and insanity, not because of some physiological origin (as is often claimed), but rather from his inability to deal with cultural conflicts and his psychological obsession with rivalry.  Girard suggests that we can see Nietzsche as an extreme representative of normal human behaviour and tendencies, as well as evidence that envy and resentment still drive solitary genius.  Ultimately, this personal deconstructive attack on Nietzsche leads to a theoretical insight: that Nietzsche did not want to see that there was no battle between Christ and Dionysus, it was a false battle, and that Christ had replaced Dionysus once and for all:⁷

“Whatever its origins, Nietzsche’s madness certainly derives from the constant, increasingly accelerated switching from “the Crucified” to Dionysius and from archaic religion to Christianity.  Nietzsche did not want to see that Christ has taken Dionysus’s place once and for all; that he had both appropriated and transformed the Greek heritage.  Nietzsche thus allows himself to be swallowed up in violence’s fight to the death with truth.  In fact, he feels that combat more strongly than anyone else.” 

In this way, what Nietzsche calls “will to power” in opposite to “will to truth”, would be for Girard, a being “swallowed up in violence” as opposed to the inner transformation of violence through a Christ-like sacrifice for the metaphysical truth of the trinitarian God.  Consequently, for Girard, Nietzsche is not a philosophical advance beyond religion, but rather someone who demonstrates the deadly mistakes that can be made when one has not learned how to sublate the moment and the meaning of Christ.  At the same time, as Nietzsche was someone thinking within (what Girard calls) mimesis qua desire, as opposed to using religion to think above and beyond it (as if he is in another world), we could also say that the courage of Nietzsche to play in the danger of these dimensions, is also a blind spot in Girard’s own thinking:⁸

“We cannot escape mimetism; we always participate in it in some way, and those who acknowledge it interest me more than those who try to dissimulate it.

I became aware of this obvious point only gradually.  I long tried to think of Christianity as in a higher position, but I have had to give up on that.  I am now persuaded that we have to think from inside mimetism.”     

(1.5) Michel Foucault:

Michel Foucault is another philosophical great who was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche.  Foucault claims that Nietzsche’s approach and method of philosophy is the basic foundation stone of Foucaultian critical social theory, an approach and method that allowed him to break with the German “H-Triad” of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger.  This approach was based on the undermining of the subject of knowledge, even explicitly up to Hegel’s idea of “absolute knowledge”, as a will that is committed to truth above desire and passion, but rather a will whose truth is that it is enslaved to desire and passion:⁹

“The subject of knowledge [...] according to the mask it bears, historical consciousness is neutral, devoid of passions, and committed solely to truth.  But if it examines itself and if, more generally, it interrogates the various forms of scientific consciousness in its history, it finds that all these forms and transformations are aspects of the will to knowledge: instinct, passion, the inquisitor’s devotion, cruel subtlety, and malice.”  

In this way, Foucault is suggesting that Nietzsche’s deconstruction of knowledge-truth for power-truth is actually allowing us to unmask knowledge’s violence.  We tend to think of knowledge as the key to peace, and power as the source of violence.  But with this inversion, we approach a more truthful view of the human subject:¹⁰

“The historical analysis of this rancorous will to knowledge reveals that all knowledge rests upon injustice [...] and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous[...]).”

In moving to a perspective based on the will to power, Foucault suggests that Nietzsche is opening us to a perspective where we connect to the real source of life movement:¹¹

“Nietzsche [...] reproached critical history for detaching us from every real source and for sacrificing the very movement of life to the exclusive concern for truth.”

The Nietzschean method therein employed by Foucault was based on the understanding that truth is subservient to the task of active self-constitution under the will to power (as opposed to its repression), that truth rectifies itself on the basis of its own principles of self-regulation (as opposed to existing in a separate and self-sufficient ontological domain created by the will to knowledge).  For Foucault, these methods were essential for libidinal becoming outside of regimes of normative social power structure.

(1.6) Albert Camus:

Albert Camus found in Nietzsche the premier diagnostician of the modern (or post-modern) human predicament, i.e. the Death of God, and the possibility that we can fill this void ourselves, that is, with our own life on earth:¹²

“For Nietzsche, to kill God is to become god oneself; it is to realise on this earth the eternal life of which the Gospel speaks.”  

Camus proposed that this was discovered existentially in the souls of his contemporaries.  The consequence of this existential soul-discovery means that there is no world unity, no final judgement, no absolute or permanent values.  This contradicted the entire metaphysical foundation of the Christian world.  In this way, for Camus, we must attack or negate all metaphysical attempts to fill the void, which also contradicted many of the metaphysical political foundations that were proposed in the void of Christianity (e.g. Fascism, Communism, Capitalism etc.).  What we must rather do is courageously confront the void with our life as a drama:¹³  

““What matters,” said Nietzsche, “is not eternal life but eternal vivacity.”  All drama is, in fact, in this choice.”  

Camus’ analysis of the human condition thus opens us, not to a new ideology, but to the absurdity of our own role as creator:¹⁴

“The absurd joy par excellence is creation.  “Art and nothing but art,” said Nietzsche; “we have art in order not to die of the truth.””

The exploration of artistic creation pushes us to the most extreme forms of existence (what was previously barred or contained by metaphysical projects). 

(1.7) Jean Paul Sartre:

One of the most famous existentialists of the 20th century, Jean Paul Sartre, found in Nietzsche an inspiration to approach the problems of existential nihilism and the loss of objective meaning.  Sartre agreed with Nietzsche that the question of meaning is central to the phenomenon of nihilism.  He ultimately committed to a form of atheism based on the idea that pre-modern or classical meaning depended on other-worldly thinking, and that we lose this foundation in the modern world, i.e. there is no other world behind or beyond the world of appearance that can guarantee our meaning or purpose, but only the appearance of the world itself:¹⁵

“The appearance refers to the total series of appearances and not to a hidden reality which would drain to itself all the being of the existent.”

Sartre also agreed with Nietzsche that this forces us to include within our thinking of the truth the idea of the will to power.  Here Sartre attempted to strengthen Nietzschean philosophy in the idea that to create values in these existential coordinates, we must use the will to power in a way that opens us up to a new project-based becoming based on the positivity of appearance alone:¹⁶

“Once we get away from what Nietzsche called “the illusion of worlds-behind-the-scene”, and if we no longer believe in the being-behind-the-appearance, then the appearance becomes full positivity; its essence is an “appearing” which is no longer opposed to being but on the contrary is the measure of it.  For the being of an existent is exactly what it appears.” 

The consequence of a project-based becoming on the basis of appearance itself as positive, is that we move the will to power from an unconscious in-itself lost behind or beyond appearance, towards a self-conscious for-itself where we meet appearances directly as the in-itself.  If we do not live up to this necessity, we will be controlled by the unconscious in-itself of an other’s self-conscious project as will to power. 

(1.8) Ayn Rand:

Ayn Rand was enormously influenced by Nietzsche in the first half of her career.  She referred to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a text that could replace The Bible as the foundational text that allows one to overcome desires for suicide in the self-organization of life to the overman as a process of self-overcoming.¹⁷  However, she also expressed extreme bitterness and resentment because, in confronting Nietzsche’s work, she felt that she had been beaten to all of her best ideas.  From this place, Rand started to differentiate from Nietzsche, and developed her own philosophy which she titled “objectivism”, against Nietzsche’s aforementioned “perspectivism”, and which in many ways can be understood as its opposite:¹⁸

“I disagree with Nietzsche emphatically on all fundamentals.”

Objectivism argued that an objective perspective for human existence was possible, and based on a rational absolute organised by a telos towards happiness.  In this respect she came to understand herself as primarily inspired and motivated by the work of Aristotle.  From this philosophical standpoint, she deviated from Nietzsche’s eccentric madness and careless abandon, since Nietzsche questioned the idea that reason was even possible at all, and that happiness was a pseudo-goal to be negated.  It is from this position that she would state:¹⁹

“I do not want to be confused with Nietzsche in any respect.”

(1.9) Paul Ricoeur:

Paul Ricoeur used Nietzsche as a key foundation stone, along with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, making a triad that can be read together, for what he called the “hermeneutics of suspicion”:²⁰  

“Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.”

For all three masters, we find a deep questioning or suspicion of consciousness itself, as well as the methods that it uses to derive true knowledge:²¹

“Thus the distinguishing characteristic of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche is the general hypothesis concerning both the process of false consciousness and the method of deciphering.” 

In this hermeneutics we should read texts with skepticism that exposes repressed meanings, unmasking lies or illusions of consciousness in relation to theological issues and intellectual history in general.  This school opens us to a new realm of ideological critique, where we should never believe the appearances of a text in a straight-forward way, but rather read the text as inherently curved/bent/distorted from within by either the logic of capital (Marx), the will to power (Nietzsche), or unconscious symptoms (Freud).  For Nietzsche specifically, what we have to pay attention to is the way in which his project is fundamentally entangled with reclaiming new power and force, buried under the knowledge of power and force, that potentially pacifies humanity. For Ricoeur, the stakes of properly interpreting Nietzsche involve extending this project in a way that avoids the potential violence that could be its result:²²

“What Nietzsche wants is the increase of man’s power, the restoration of his force; but the meaning of the will to power must be recaptured by mediating on the ciphers “superman”, “eternal return”, and “Dionysus”, without which the power in question would be but worldly violence.” 

(1.10) Gilles Deleuze: 

Yet another philosophical great who was strongly influenced by Nietzsche is perhaps the most famous philosopher of the 20th century: Gilles Deleuze.  Deleuze presents Nietzsche as a systematically coherent philosopher with a systematically coherent philosophy in the centrality of the will to power as a force to overcome the reductionist atomistic philosophy:²³  

“But the question is: can the basic notion of atom accommodate the essential relation which is attempted to it?  The concept only becomes coherent if one thinks of force instead of atom.  For the notion of atom cannot in itself contain the difference necessary for the affirmation of such a relation, difference in and according to the essence.  Thus atomism would be a mask for an incipient dynamism.)

Nietzsche’s concept of force is therefore that of a force which is related to another force: in this form force is called will.  The will (will to power) is the differential element of force.  A new conception of the philosophy of the will follows from this.”

However, Deleuze offers interpretations of the will to power which were extremely unconventional at the time, and perhaps have since become standardised: the will to power should not be understood as power seeking external and established values, but more about the overcoming of external and established values for the establishing of new values from an internal process of self-transformation:²⁴

“Nietzsche says: the will to power has been conceived as if the will wanted power, as if the power were what the will wanted.  Consequently power has turned into something represented, an idea of power of the slave and the impotent was formed, power was judged according to the attribution of ready-made established values; the will to power was not conceived of independently of a combat in which the prize was these established values[.]  Against this fettering of the will Nietzsche announces that the will is joyful.  Against the image of a will which dreams of having established values attributed to it Nietzsche announces that to will is to create new values.

Will to power does not mean that the will wants power.  Will to power does not imply any anthropomorphism in its origin, signification or essence.  Will to power must be interpreted in a completely different way: power is the one that wills in the will.”

Deleuze thus frames Nietzcshe as forwarding a philosophy of force and will that is empowering and joyful.  He also suggests that, in developing this perspective, he is the most important philosopher since Spinoza, since both not only revolutionise theory, but also the very practice of philosophy itself.  Thus, Nietzsche separates himself from other philosophers, not just because of his brilliant ideas, but because of his style, the way he expresses his ideas, and the fact that he forged a totally unconventional thinking path, a thinking path that expresses the essence of difference.

(1.11) Carl Jung:

The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung thought that Nietzsche’s famous “God is Dead” is not a dogmatic assertion by a mad philosopher, but rather the identification of a psychological fact.  For Jung, Nietzsche represents the rise of psychology in its own right, a rise so strong that it threatens to swallow the whole of philosophy into itself, which is perhaps why Jung transitioned from psychoanalysis into more philosophical and mystical territory.  In Jung’s view, this rise of psychology is the only necessity after the response to Nietzsche’s call for an individuation towards the overman was met by the emergence of new philosophical metaphysics twisting Nietzsche into its opposite: a distorted rise of herd mentality and collectivism (e.g. evident in both Fascism and Communism).  Thus, Jung’s Nietzsche does not so much extend philosophy, but end philosophy, and birth psychology proper.  This birth represented a coming age of struggle, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra would help provide this struggle with its vital content:²⁵

“Nietzsche at heart was much nearer to [...] that nether world [that] had not yet come. [...] To him it was certain that we were approaching an epoch of unprecedented struggle.  He [...] was, the only true pupil of Schopenhauer, who tore through the veil of naivete and in his Zarathustra conjured up from the nether region ideas that were destined to be the most vital content of the coming age.”  

However, Jung also had a complex relationship with the works of Nietzsche and the figure of Zarathustra.  For Jung, Nietzsche also failed to reconcile himself with the nature of the true “Self” with a capital S, resulting in his madness leading him ultimately away from his creative genius and deeper into a death spiral.  In this way, Jung thought that Nietzsche had intuitive insights about the nature of the true Self but ultimately failed to think it, to raise it to a logical life project.  

(1.12) Jacques Lacan:

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who based his career on a return to Freudian foundations, has a strange and complicated relationship to Nietzsche.  Both Nietzsche and Lacan would agree that metaphysics is not produced by a will to knowledge for truth, but rather as a way to defend oneself against knowing the truth, it is difficult to tell whether or not they agree on how to interpret the will to power.  On the one hand, Lacan seems to suggest that Nietzsche’s overman leads us in an inflated, potentially narcissistic direction, which could lead us into a frigid and isolating culture as self-punishment:²⁶

“Modern man [...] forces himself to blow up Nietzsche inflatable superman, replies with all his ills and all his deeds: “God is dead, nothing is permitted anymore.”

These ills and deeds all bear the signification of self-punishment.”

One could say that Lacan, while agreeing with the basic thesis, was less optimistic about the “Death of God” in the form of transforming that void into an overman-centric project.  However, in regards to the will to power and truth, there is certainly an interesting and complex conversation between the two thinkers on the dimension of corporeal thought, of sexual or libidinal drives for transcending simple pleasures and developing some sort of real signifying contact with joy.  If we are looking for the contours for this interesting and complex conversation, we may find it in thinking the future of scientific man, as well as the differences between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on the topic of repetition:²⁷

“It is repetition itself whose face [...] Kierkegaard, renewed for us in the division of the subject, the fate of scientific man.  Let another confusion be dispelled: it bears no relation to Nietzsche’s “eternal return”.”         

(1.13) Jacques Derrida:

For Jacques Derrida, Nietzsche is a unique philosopher insofar as he adopts a totally anti-academic style, the way he undermined the very life-ways of scholars and intellectuals.  This emphasis on deconstructing embodied performativity, is something that Derrida was aiming at, above simply deconstruction or reconstruction of abstract concepts.  In terms of his actual philosophy, Derrida thought that Nietzsche was capable of deconstructing the entire Kantian tradition based on experience mediated by a priori categories of mind vis-a-vis an infinite noumena.  Kant’s categories of the understanding presupposed notions like space, time, causality, and Nietzsche explodes these notions from within.  Thus we can see Nietzsche as a model for the deconstructionist canon, an example of how deconstruction is done in practice.  Here we are barred from a metaphysical real of the in-itself (e.g. understandings of infinity, immortality, etc.), and rather affirming processes of becoming with categories that emerge from that very process itself.  However, in this deconstruction, Derrida claims that Nietzsche joins a philosophical canon of apocalypse, where are also introduced to visions of the end, whether of the last man, or the overman:²⁸

“The reading or analysis of those whom we could nickname the classics of the end.  They formed the canon of the modern apocalypse (end of History, end of Man, end of Philosophy, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger[.])”

In regards to Nietzsche’s specific end, Derrida seems to associate it with the relationship between the overman and the last man, with the last man actually being the embodiment of a pointless relativity or multiplicity; and the overman being an absolute determination that totally deconstructs the idea that Nietzsche himself as a relativist:²⁹

“Nietzsche [...] constantly caricatured and reduced to a few miserable stereotypes: for example, the “relativist”! and not the thinker of a “last man” whom he so often named as such[.]”

(1.14) Luce Irigaray:

For the feminist scholar Luce Irigaray, Nietzsche is used as one of the philosophical greats whose work can be engaged in dialogue (others include Plato and Freud).  Irigaray’s main concern is to open the problem of women in relation to both language and philosophy, here searching for a feminine writing that privileges fragments over unity:³⁰

“[Veiled Lips] addresses [...] problems in and through the texts of Nietzsche — affirming the possibility of a feminine writing, in a style which diverges radically from traditional syntactical norms.  Fragments of sentences exist side by side, without subordination — parts which are wholes, “and yet without unity”.”

She claims that the logic which dominates models of discursive coherence and closure amounts to a “death sentence” for woman, a death sentence that has been concretely expressed by past philosophers (including Nietzsche and his views on women).  Nietzsche, as well as other philosophers, systematically define woman negatively, as man’s opposite-other: not-man, an object, not a subject.  Through dialogue with Nietzsche’s use of woman as a category, she participates in a strategic re-questioning of woman’s position in a system of representation which depends on repressing her difference, claiming that she is a lack in discourse.  For Irigaray, the result of this dialogue is conceiving of woman’s desire as a mobile multiplicity that can never end:³¹

“Woman is neither closed nor open.  Indefinite, in-finite, form is never completed in her… This incompleteness of her form, of her morphology, permits her at every instant to become something else, which isn’t to say that she is ever unequivocally nothing… No singular form, act, discourse, subject, masculine, feminine, can terminate the becoming of a woman’s desire.”

Here it is interesting to see Irigaray’s own performativity as analogous or representative of feminine voiceless voice which seems to be the indispensable companion of Zarathustra throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  This voice appears indispensable because it always seems to remind Zarathustra of his own incompleteness, opening him to new inexhaustible dimensions of desire.  

(1.15) Nick Land:

The philosopher Nick Land offers us a Nietzsche which attempts to develop a shamanic psyche in the sociotechnological age.  This Nietzsche is an escape from philosophy as conceptualization for ulterior zones, and a total abandonment of “things-in-themselves”, whether a religious monotheist God, or the Kantian noumenal thing of ultimate reality.  In this way, for Land, Nietzsche’s will to power allows us to transcend an understanding of universality that is based on a normative ideality:³²

“Kant was able to remain bourgeois [...] only because he also remained an idealist, or in other words a Christian (a ‘cunning Christian’ as Nietzsche calls him) and identified universality with ideality rather than with power.”   

Here we can move towards what Land calls a-categorical invisible splendours, immense deathscapes without images, and a beyond of all integral truths that can only be approached in a Nietzschean “recovery and affirmation of the fictive power of art”.³³  What brings these three categories — a-categorical invisible splendours, immense deathscapes without images, and a beyond of integral truths — together is the gap in the image of the concept, the fact that the concept is not-all, cannot totalize the field of understanding.  For Land, as for Nietzsche, it could be that this gap is itself the dimension of the feminine that disrupts the masculine desire for total closure and completion in a totalising logic:³⁴

“There is [a] troubling, enticing, arousing, and captivating type of beauty (Nietzsche will come to say it is the only one), the beauty that is exemplified [...] in the female body.”  

The gap, the not-all, and the lack of totalization is where most psyche’s go “mad”, but where the shamanic psyche thrives, and can finally fly (against the spirit of gravity).  This becomes the foundation for what Land calls “libidinal materialism”, which is a a frame of reference that in many ways can be juxtaposed against “dialectical materialism”, offering a line of thought that runs through Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as opposed to Hegel and Freud.  Here is how Land conceives of the program, as well as Nietzsche’s involvement in it:³⁵

“A few of the things that Nietzsche learnt — at least in part — from Schopenhauer were the elementary tenets of libidinal materialism or the philosophy of the energetic unconscious (the unrestricted development of the theory of genius), the primacy of the body and its medical condition, pragmatism (asking not how we know but why we know), effervescent literary brilliance, aestheticism (with a musical focus), an ‘aristocratic’ concern for hierarchy and gradation (which he turned into an implement for overcoming Aristotelian logic), antihumanism, a construction of the history of philosophy as dominated by PLato and Kant and the problematic of reality and appearance, virulent anti-academicism, misogyny, and the distrust of mathematical thinking.”  

Consequently, it is clear that Nietzsche can be understood as a core thinker for Land, and a key for Land in the development of his own thinking path.

(1.16) Daniel Dennett:

The evolutionary philosopher Daniel Dennett attempts to oppose the post-structuralist and deconstructionist interpretations of Nietzsche in favour of a scientific or Darwinian reading of Nietzsche.  For Dennett the post-structuralist and deconstructionist interpretations of Nietzsche downplay the importance and the role that Darwin played in Nietzsche’s thought, and also the dimensions of Nietzsche’s thought that are more Darwinian than Nietzsche himself thought, even if as a “sociobiological” provocation:³⁶

“Friedrich Nietzsche published his Genealogy of Morals in 1887.  He was the second great sociobiologist, and, unlike Hobbes, he was inspired (or provoked) by Darwinism.”

Dennett suggests that Nietzsche was working in the direction and tradition of Darwinian science, as both were against Christian metaphysics.  Moreover, for Dennett, Nietzschean idea’s of morality are fundamentally evolutionary in nature, and can be rooted and extended in pre-human sociobiological conflict.  Throughout his treatment of Nietzsche, Dennett seems to suggest that Nietzsche was a great “cultural evolutionist” who cannot be reduced to the Social Darwinists of his day who abuse Darwinian thinking, but rather extends Darwinism into history and politics without succumbing to political correctness:³⁷

“Nietzsche’s Just So Stories are terrific (old-style and new-style).  They are a mixture of brilliant and crazy, sublime and ignoble, devastatingly acute history and untrammeled fantasy. [...] Neither Darwin nor Nietzsche was politically correct, fortunately for us.

(Political correctness, in the extreme versions worthy of the name, is antithetical to almost all surprising advances in thought. [...]

Nietzsche’s most important contribution to sociobiology, I think, is his steadfast application of one of Darwin’s own fundamental insights [—] the mistake of inferring current function or meaning from ancestral function or meaning [—] to the realm of cultural evolution.”        

While Dennett admits that Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole is against a type of naive scientific objectivity, he argues that his work is still consistent within an evolutionary picture of the universe, and perhaps a demonstration of how philosophy started to integrate evolutionary thinking into ideas of culture, society, history, and politics.

(1.17) Max More:

The transhumanist philosopher Max More claims that Nietzsche’s nihilism is only a transitory stage between the breakdown of religious interpretations of the world and the emergence of the transhuman being.  In this sense Nietzsche is a figure between two-worlds: the world of the religious human, and the world of the transhuman post-human, breaking from the former, and directly influencing the latter:³⁸

“I argue that [...] there were many fundamental similarities between transhumanism and Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially concerning the concept of the posthuman and that of Nietzsche’s overhuman   [...] these are not merely parallels: transhumanist ideas were directly influenced by Nietzsche.” 

For More, Nietzsche’s overman as the meaning of the earth is a notion that can easily be adapted to a modern scientific and technological way of thinking, where heroic self-transformation through overcoming is essentially connected to the potentials of the 21st century transcendence of humanity.  Moreover, this path is a clear break from religion:³⁹

“The religionist has no answer to the extropic challenge put by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: ‘I teach you the overman.  Man is something that is to be overcome.  What have you done to overcome him?’”

For More, what Nietzsche essentially shares with transhumanism, is a radical contempt for our inherited evolutionary history and biological condition; where Nietzsche emphasises the transformation of values, transhumanism emphasises the technical foundation for overcoming:⁴⁰

“For both the individual and species perspective, the concept of self-overcoming resonates strongly with extropic, transhumanist ideals and goals.  Although Nietzsche’ had little to say about technology as a means of self-overcoming, neither did he rule it out.  And, as a champion of what he saw as a coming age of science, it is not difficult to see technology as part of the process of self-overcoming, so long as it is integrated firmly with will and self-assertion. [...] New technologies allow us new means of becoming who we are — another step towards posthuman ideals — and new ways of “giving style” to our character.”

(1.18) Peter Sloterdijk:

Continental philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has a complex picture of Nietzsche as a philosopher, sometimes using him as a foundation stone for his project, and other times suggesting Nietzsche as a mistake.  His complex view and relation of Nietzsche can be perhaps summarised as follows:⁴¹

“Nietzsche, the master formulator of truths one cannot live with, but cannot ignore without intellectual dishonesty[.]”  

Here we will emphasise the way that Sloterdijk views Nietzsche as a tragic catastrophe of thought and questioning that modern man cannot come to terms with but also must come to terms with.  Sloterdijk tends to situate Nietzsche in historical context of an extremely uncertain age that has lost centring in religious praxis, but is also being called towards higher praxis.  If we turn down this challenge, for Sloterdijk, we are turning down the fires of our spirit, and perhaps doomed to become captured by technology into a spirit and civilisation that privileges comfort over arduous struggle that is necessary for true becoming:⁴²

“To free up ground for the artificial surrogate sphere, the leftovers of faith in inner worlds and the fiction of security are being destroyed in all old countries in the name of a thoroughgoing market enlightenment that promises a better life, yet initially lowers the immune standards of the proletariats and marginal peoples to a devastating degree.  Dumbfounded masses soon find themselves in the open, without ever receiving a proper explanation of their evaculation’s purpose.  Disappointed, cold and abandoned, they wrap themselves in surrogates of older conceptions of the world, as long as these still seem to hold a trace of the warmth of old human illusions of encompassedness.

[Nietzsche:]“Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?  What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?  Where is it moving to now?  Where are we moving to?  Away from all suns?  Are we not continually falling?  And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions?  Is there still an up and a down?  Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing?  Isn’t empty space breathing at us?  Hasn’t it got colder?”

These questions open up the yawning abyss that current discourses on globalisation ignore in their industrious hysteria.  In shelless times, without spatial orientation and overwhelmed by their own progress, those living in modernity suddenly had to become splendid people by the masses.  One can view technological civilisation, in particular its accelerations in the twentieth century, as an attempt to drown the questions of Nietzsche’s chief witness, the tragic Diogenes, in comfort.”

In this way, Sloterdijk’s philosophical project can be seen to open up into a Nietzschean affirmation for the overman, for a philosophy that is capable of praxis, for a philosophy that avoids comforts of technological civilisation, and rather attempts to reinvent the hard path of struggle and a new relation to truth.

(1.19) Alain Badiou:

Alain Badiou, another famous philosopher in the continental tradition, represents Nietzsche as the ultimate anti-philosopher.  As a Platonist and mathematician, Badiou is here referring to antiphilosophy as a movement away from abstract thinking and towards vital life affirmation, as well as a movement away from logic and numbers and towards biology:⁴³

“For Nietzsche, negative abstraction represented by the old philosophy must be destroyed to liberate the genuine vital affirmation, the great ‘Yes!’ to all that exists. [...]

Plato’s philosophy was summoned by the beginning of mathematics, or Kant’s philosophy by Newtonian physics. [For a vitalistic philosophy] in particular, it depends on facts that belong to the domain of [...] biology for Nietzsche, Bergson or Deleuze.”      

However, Badiou still understands Nietzsche as a part of the philosophical lineage that includes himself, and as pointing towards the dangers of the “the last man” as a nihilistic figure in the era of the “Death of God”, a figure who has lost the capacity for engaging the creative possibilities of one’s historical moment, which requires self-overcoming:⁴⁴

“The result can only be the sad success of what Nietzsche named ‘the last man’.  ‘The last man’ is the exhausted figure of a man devoid of any figure.  It is the nihilistic image of the fixed nature of the human animal, devoid of all creative possibility of overcoming.”   

In this way, Badiou seems to be positioning Nietzsche as both a threat to philosophy as understood conventionally or classically, but also as a positive challenge to our historical situation, which seems to be in danger of losing its capacity for true greatness. 

(1.20) Alenka Zupančič:

Alenka Zupančič, one of the key figures in the emerging Slovenian school of philosophy, strongly inspired by Hegelian and psychoanalytic interpretations, suggests that Nietzsche is a philosopher whose time has finally come, only insofar as we view Nietzsche as someone who is unfashionable and out-of-place in any time.  She emphasises that while Nietzsche has become accepted by academic philosophers, his style is most certainly still perceived as a disturbance, and totally unfit for inclusion, and rather treated like some sort of exotic curiosity:⁴⁵

“If Nietzsche’s style is esteemed within academia, it is in no way accepted by it.  Its “jolts” are either swept under the carpet or treated as curious, rather exotic objects.”

The question of why Nietzsche is both esteemed and rejected could be due to the fact that it is his style which leads to a type of personal revelation which is antithetical to the academic careerist path, or even philosophical credibility in general:⁴⁶

“There is probably no other philosopher who, by virtue of his “style”, exposes himself in his work as much as Nietzsche does. And the pathos of his writing springs precisely from this [...]; it is the pathos of life.”

Consequently, Nietzschean philosophy, for Zupančič, can only be articulated, not as a unity of all things under the overman, but as the moment of a splitting of the one (God) into two (overman):⁴⁷

“Nietzsche, will break the history of mankind in two; he is no man, but “dynamite”; he is “destiny”; with Zarathustra[.]”  

This ushers us into an era of irreducible difference and tension, the interpretation and motor of overcoming postmodern hedonism itself.  Thus, what is lost in the Death of God is the loss of a unified totality.  However, against the postmodern affirmation of multiplicity, Zupančič suggests that totality is riddled by the one that is two, with an emphasis on the primacy and importance of antagonism over plurality.

(1.21) Ray Brassier:

Ray Brassier is a philosopher of nihilism who suggests that Nietzsche’s framing of the problem of nihilism is the problem of what to do with time:⁴⁸  

“Nothing will have happened: Nietzsche’s ‘fable’ perfectly distils nihilism’s most disquieting suggestion: that from the original emergence of organic sentience to the ultimate extinction of human sapience ‘nothing will have happened’. [...] ‘Becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing’.  Yet Nietzsche’s entire philosophy is dedicated to overcoming this nihilistic conjecture.”  

For Brassier, Nietzsche opens time as a major sociohistorical problem without solution in a final state of knowing, reconciliation or culmination of spiritual development.  This means we have to fully accept the loss of a transcendental guarantee, either in the form of God, or any other positive pay-off for the work that structures our experience of time, and instead affirm the “eternal recurrence” as the “thought of thoughts”:⁴⁹

“For Nietzsche, this aporia of nihilism is simultaneously crystallised and dissolved in the thought of eternal recurrence.  The thought of recurrence is at once the ultimate nihilistic conjecture — ‘existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness’ — and what vanquishes nihilism by turning momentary transience into an object of unconditional affirmation and thereby into a locus of absolute worth.”

Here Brassier splits from Nietzsche by going deeper into negativity, as opposed to claiming that we can close off the problem of nihilism and time with amor fati as the love of fate and its metaphysical justification in the eternal recurrence.  Brassier simply affirms nihilism as the truth and the most powerful transformative act: nihilism unbound.  Thus, his thinking does not revolve around a will that eternally wills itself but rather thinks:⁵⁰

“How does thought think a world without thought?  Or more urgently: How does thought think the death of thinking?”

(1.22) Alexander Bard:

Philosopher Alexander Bard starts with a meditation on Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is Dead” in his work on the paradigm of Syntheism.  Bard suggests that Nietzsche’s “God is Dead” is an incomplete paradigmatics which requires a deeper understanding of the historical process itself, as well as the way God functions as an ideological formation created by humans.  Like Nietzsche, Bard agrees that the Christian God as paradigmatics is dead (i.e. sky father, creator of the universe, all-knowing being, etc.); but unlike Nietzsche, Bard suggests that the idea of God is ultimately undeconstructible (i.e. everyone’s unconscious always-already believes in God, everyone’s constructive projects are always-already attempts to achieve religion).  Consequently, for Bard, Nietzsche falls back into a circular view of history as opposed to an event-based view of history, where a new paradigm can emerge from the death of the old paradigm:⁵¹

“Nietzsche struggles with an aristocratic ideal in the form of the [overman] as a historical event [...] while he himself constantly reverts to a nomadological thought pattern without really taking hold in the history of eventology. [...] Therefore he does not understand, in contrast to Zoroaster and Hegel, the difference between a nomadological worldview with only will-to-intelligence, where history therefore must be circular, on the one hand, and on the other hand an eventological worldview, that contains both will-to-intelligence and will-to-transcendence, and which therefore must be understood as the path which leads out of the nomadologically circular and that encompasses a genuinely exodological event.”      

He rather proposes that God can be consciously and affirmatively embedded as a foundation stone within a new paradigmatics (i.e. Syntheism).  The Syntheist metaphysics sees God as the integral idea within a future hyper-technological humanity which is heroically-oriented towards the greatest conceivable project.  For Bard, this project is the creation of God.

(1.23) Julie Reshe:

Negative psychoanalyst Julie Reshe has also engaged extensively with Nietzsche’s philosophy and sees in Nietzsche’s work a necessary turn in philosophy away from order and towards chaos as natural.  In other words, in the history of philosophy, with foundations in Plato and Aristotle, we can see a tendency towards idealisation with order and unity in notions of the one; whereas this tendency is de-naturalised in Nietzsche’s philosophy towards the naturalisation of chaos:⁵²

“As for humans, in a more refined Nietzschean perspective, they are natural not in the sense they are harmonious and adapted but in the sense that they are chaotic.  They are enduring chaos.”

In that sense, Nietzsche for Reshe is opening up the truth about the human condition, not in terms of the possibility of one day achieving a unity with a well-ordered unity, but rather in the capacity to endure chaos.  Although there is the potentiality to learn how to create in that endurance, that endurance itself is fundamentally connected to suffering and destruction, and the hopeless temptation towards the illusion of order is ever present:⁵³

“Chaos is damaging and suffering-inducing.  To sustain the chaos, one needs to impose a certain regularity on it, arrange it, or pertain an illusion of it being cancelled by ordering.  The imposition of order over chaos is always ultimately unsuccessful.”   

In that sense, to become more natural, for Reshe’s Nietzsche, is to become more harmonised with disharmony, and ultimately to become more adapted to self-destruction itself.  Consequently, fo Reshe, this is a path that leads extinction in the face of an untamable and deadly chaos.  The only alternative path, is the path of “the last man”, whom Reshe suggests protect themselves from their chaotic core, inventing happiness as an antidote for truth.⁵⁴      

(1.24) Daniel Tutt

Marxist philosopher Daniel Tutt focuses on Nietzsche in order to displace and undermine certain tendencies within leftist politics to “whitewash” and “defang” Nietzsche’s reactionary core.  For Tutt, Nietzsche must be fundamentally read as a sophisticated reactionary political thinker as opposed to an apolitical philosopher who can be used in the service of emancipatory political aims:⁵⁵

“We propose to read Nietzsche as driven, fundamentally, by politics; by a highly sophisticated, reactionary political vision[.] [...] Nietzcshe’s thought produces a set of ideologies that continue to interact with and shape our liberal, entrepreneurial, capitalist society, a society that tells us that only rare geniuses push culture, innovation, and art forward, while the vast majority exist as a hindrance or as mediocre subalterns. Nietzscheanism is thus defined here as the cultural effect of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which makes up a certain type of common sense [...] regarding how we relate to hierarchy and equality, to the way we understand morals, to art, suffering, and aesthetics.”

In this way Tutt sees Nietzsche’s philosophy and its popularity as complicit in or lending support to a form of capitalist realism.  For Tutt, the main social problems of our age involve the capitalist ruling class controlling mass amounts of wealth, as well as the reproduction of a managerial class that blocks the possibility of real systemic change, like universal health care or freedom to experience leisure time outside of constant wage labour.  While Tutt does not see Nietzsche’s philosophy as responsible or at fault for such a reality, he does see the industry built around Nietzsche’s thinking, as justifying this social reality, which makes it impossible to really change the status quo:⁵⁶

“What I want to stress is that Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism [...] have played an important role [...] in creating a philosophy that justifies the persistence of an unjust social order.”     

(1.25) Tim Adalin

Creator and founder of Voicecraft, Tim Adalin, specialises in the art and practice of dialogue or dialogos.  Consequently, his vision of Nietzsche, and specifically his vision of Zarathustra, is strongly influenced by the form of dialogue, or rather lack thereof, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  Adalin notes that, while we see Zarathustra undergo dramatic periods of transformation mediated through solitude and meditation, we rarely see Zarathustra engaged in real dialogue with the other, but rather see Zarathustra caught in a fantasy of a greater other yet-to-come:⁵⁷

“In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we see the character of Zarathustra iteratively undergo periods of solitude, transformative meditation and contemplation, and return to relation with other beings in the world.  Even at the very close, in leaving his cave full of so-called higher men to set off alone once more, the movement away is framed by relation to his children to come.  Aloneness, embedded in deeper relation to other as a kind of greater-than.”

In this way, Adalin suggests that we do not find the tools in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra for a real relational ontology, but rather find Nietzsche often relating to the other as “hammer to nail”.  For Adalin, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra too often tells us rather than shows us the way to being beloved in community.  Thus, his leadership is not one that invites a network of equals to a collective transformation, but rather one that is too concerned with destroying a set of historical values that he perceives to be an abstract deadening (Platonist, Christian, etc.):⁵⁸

“It is here, in the mode of relating with this other, where I find myself to be in difference with the Nietzsche I read, and most particularly with respect to the notion of spiritual leadership.  Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a truly profound text.  Yet there’s a sense in which the hammer Nietzsche so famously employs in his philosophy (which as a metaphor sometimes does the elegant subtlety of his prose disservice), does seem too often to treat the human being encountered as a nail.  There is purpose in the hammering, to be sure.  And it’s worth contending the observation that Nietzsche is also engaged to hammer at the ‘table of values’ which ‘hang over’ the post-Platonist, Christian, Western culture as he sees it.  But there is little by way of transformative dialogue in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and too often we are told that, rather than shown how Zarathustra comes to be beloved by some.”

Consequently, while Adalin maintains Nietzsche’s significance, he also searches for a process of transformative intelligibility and meaning towards the earth, that is more dialogical and relational, one that encourages real participation, as opposed to an inflated overman presenting as an infinitely superior being.  The message is simple: for Adalin, true spiritual leadership can be found in how we treat others. 

(1.26) Daniel L. Garner (O.G. Rose)

Philosopher Daniel L. Garner of O.G. Rose attempts to re-think Nietzsche in the context of a blindspot of Plato's famous cave allegory.  For Rose, Nietzsche’s notion of the yea-saying “Child” points to the dimension of “intrinsic motivation” and the question of how we escape Plato’s cave on our own.  The stakes for this project open up in the difference between “bestowing” and “becoming”.  When we are in the mode of “bestowing” we receive our values and desires externally as given from the outside, this is the equivalent of Plato’s Cave.  But when we are in the mode of “becoming” we receive our values and desires from our own intrinsic motivation, we cultivate them internally:⁵⁹

“In pursuit of that thread suggesting no Cave must be our final resting place, we will next connect Plato with Nietzsche. [...] 

“How does anyone leave Plato’s Cave on their own?” 

At least one of Nietzsche’s “core projects” can be seen as a deconstruction of what I call “Bestow Centrism,” which is to say the prevalence of a dynamic of transaction, handing down, giving, etc. at the expense of “becoming”, which it to say we do and think like we do because of something external and extrinsic.  Nietzsche seeks and defends a dynamic of self-incubation, self-development, and the like, devoid of transaction as much as possible, where we operate more internally and intrinsically.  We need more “becoming” than “bestowing”[.]”   

For Garner, this movement from bestowing to becoming can only be partially situated within the historical context of the “Death of God”, and while it is a positive project, it is not a totalising or even a systematic alternative to the total system of traditional religion.  As opposed to this totalising and systemic approach, Garner prefers to think of Nietzsche as a part of a network of “core thinkers” who offers us “coherent visions” that stem from a “hot core”.  In other words, Garner sees Nietzsche as part of a multiplicity of thinkers who have cracked the code on problem of intrinsic motivation, and invite us into a new process of becoming that is beyond any one system or religion:⁶⁰

“Nietzsche called for an end to “Bestow Centrism”, which moralises and emphasises transferences between entities like individuals, systems, notions, etc. “The Death of God” represents only one piece of this larger vision, and ultimately a movement away from “Bestow Centrism” is for us to learn to leave Plato’s Cave on our own.

To outline the argument of the paper, we could say that Nietzsche isn’t a Systematic Philosopher, but he does have a Coherent Vision: he is what I might metaphorically call a “Core Thinker”[.]  Imagine the Earth’s core and imagine lava spurting out in different spots across the surface.  The spurts wouldn’t be directly connected, and yet they would be connected through “the common core”, and thus from one spurt we could make connections with other spurts.  This is what I mean when I say Nietzsche is a “Core Thinker”: his ideas can be connected, for they all share the same “hot source”.”   

(1.27) Alex Ebert

Artist and philosopher Alex Ebert explores Nietzsche through the importance of the mask.  It is common place to think that one’s mask is the opposite of truth, that the truth can be found when we take off our mask, in a type of unveiling and transparency.  However, Ebert suggests that Nietzsche teaches us precisely the opposite: that the mask is where we find truth.  In that way the depths are superficial, and the surface is where we find a profound truth:⁶¹

“Nietzsche, in particular, notes that there is something of the superficiality of the mask which belies (and, perhaps, even aids) interior depth.  Of course, the primary function of the mask, in its position atop the cortical layer of the face — in its superficiality — is to hide the un-superficial: the deep, the profound.  As Nietzsche writes: All that is profound loves a mask.  And yet such observations have been left largely at witty distances, waxing upon wax, as if the job of metaphysical analysis were to laminate that which already shines.  Such poetic satisfaction has left murky the operations between depth and surface, profundity and superficiality, interior and exterior, forfeiting the rewards of deeper inquiry into identity and the spiritual process.  “Spiritual process”, I say, because the mask of primary focus here will be the mask of the child.” 

However, here Ebert explores a profound paradox of identity in regards to who is upholding the mask.  He suggests that when we try to fix the truth of our own mask we end up a neurotic identity, similar to the camel in Nietzsche’s dialectic of spiritual metamorphosis.  In other words, this mask is not the true mask, this is the mask where we still find a deep split between what appears on the surface, and the unmediated truth of the depths.  Where we find the truth of the mask is in a perspective shift on others projections onto us, where others uphold a mask for us, and we let them without resistance.  For Ebert, this is the gateway away from the camel and towards the child spirit, which is more of an identity in non-identity, a mask that is just the aggregate of others' projections.  Moreover, this identity functions as a gateway that unifies Nietzsche with Christ, whom suggested that one can only enter the kingdom of heaven, if one approaches like a child:⁶²

“Allow others to carry the weight of your mask for you!  Allow the external world to exert all the droll effort and maintenance, keeping your mask in tip top shape, collapsed from a million angles by a million gazes, tense, hardened and definite. [...] It’s their problem now.  Allow anyone and everyone to be your masker.  Say “The more I am misunderstood on the outside, the larger my territory grows on the inside.”  Say “The infinity of my territory, diligently protected by the stupidity of others, the inanity of their projections, the narrow and pedantic constraints of their gaze, are what allowed me to myself.” Misunderstanding is the greatest mask of all!

[...]

Indeed, the Nietzsche and Jesus and whomever else was right — the child is the hyperobject, absorbing projection upon a projection, its exterior a proper reflections of its interior by way of the innumerable static images projected on top of it, of which it cares not at all, which it allows to play off it’s visage like light tickles the surface of the deepest ocean, ever moving, ever escaping, a terminal line of flight with no destination, no purpose but vitality.”      

(1.28) Layman Pascal

Metashaman Layman Pascal attempts to think Nietzsche and Zarathustra for our time, and for Pascal, that is a time he often refers to as “metamodern”.  While popular interpretations of Nietzsche suggest that he is the “father of postmodernism”, Pascal also suspects that good interpretations of Nietzsche are only starting to be formulated.  Metamodern Nietzsche is a Nietzsche that combines tragedy and time into a single comedic equation that encapsulated a spirit of sincere irony.  Pascal suggests that these themes and spirit can be found through all of Nietzsche’s writings, but nowhere more powerfully than in the figure of Zarathustra, which should be interpreted as a real spiritual event of authentic performativity:⁶³

“The popular aphorism (i.e. Comedy equals tragedy plus time) simultaneously — and with a typically metamodern flourish of “sincere irony” — seriously evokes two key Nietzschean themes[.]

These themes weave furiously through all of Nietzsche’s writings and nowhere more vividly than in the legendary sayings of that revelatory figure [Zarathustra] who descended into his alpine visions as though it were a stream of transrational transmission from a fantastical illuminated sage of the astral Himalayas.”

From this perspective, the proper interpretation and perhaps also embodiment of Nietzsche’s spiritual invention of Zarathustra requires a little time and tragedy.  The question of Pascal’s Nietzsche/Zarathustra thus becomes: has enough time passed and has our species endured enough tragedy to understand his prophetic message?  While Nietzscshe may have gone mad in an isolated wandering oscillation between the mountains and valleys of Europe, perhaps he would have find real friends, friends towards the overman, in the liminal web communities that are emerging online today?  Pascal’s thought wanders in this direction, and in that way offers us not only a message of hope, but also a new way to think with Nietzsche and Zarathustra today:⁶⁴

“Since I am being very generous with my reading of Nietzsche, I may as well go a step further and heap praise upon those metamodern, integral, Game B, new cognitive scientists, liminalist, developmentalist, dark renaissance, syntheist, postmetaphysical spirituality, wholist, relationalist & emerging trans-pluralist evolutionaries whom I suspect are the early signs of the first decent readers of Thus Spake Zarathustra.

It seems to me entirely plausible that these depth-oriented attempters of a world on the far side of modernity and nihilism, these new shamans and post-relativistic existential phenomenologists of becoming, these little Goethes, in all their various flavours and emphases, are the very kind of friends who were lacking among the volk, the professors and the activists of 19th century Germany.”

(1.29) Carl Hayden Smith

Experimental psychologist and media theorist Carl Hayden Smith attempts to further extend our notion of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as well as his concept of the overman into contemporary discussions about humanism and its beyond.  Smith is specifically concerned with the distinctions between humanism, transhumanism and hyperhumanism, as well as their consequences for phenomenology, technology, society and ethics.  While some theorists link Nietzsche’s notion of the overman as a transhuman concept, Smith sees transhumanism as an embodiment of the “Last Man”, while seeing hyperhumanism as the true embodiment of the overman.  The transhuman is the embodiment of the Last Man for Smith because it is an ideology which uses technology to create a complete dependence which reduces arguably reduces our capacity to truly become:⁶⁵

“Transhumanism forces us to become utterly dependent on technology, which subverts our ability to develop the skills for ourselves.  Through the use of current technology, a vast majority of humans have fallen prey to the digital feed that directs us on how to behave, what to have, what to achieve and to what to aspire.

(Trans)humans are degrading themselves to be part of this feed and as a consequence immediate gratification, confirmation bias, and neglect are taking control”

Here Smith juxtaposes transhumanism and the Last Man against hyperhumanism and the overman.  For Smith, hyperhumanism connects to rather than sheds our natural capacities, while at the same time not regressing to a luddite position, as we can still use technology as a bridge, rather than as an end.  In this way, hyperhumanism not only affirms a real becoming, but opens up a new form of becoming that Smith refers to as an “overbecoming”:⁶⁶

“Hyperhumanism is a call to remember our natural capacity to shift states, by looking towards both traditional analogue practice (shamanic/indigenous) and modern digital technology (sensory augmentation/AR).  This combination acts as a guide towards collaborative and integrated levels of consciousness, both internally, between our sensory and cognitive capacities and externally, with one another and our planet.  Hyperhumanism represents the potential of a new type of human becoming (Nietzsche might call it Over(man) becoming) which crucially is still human and remains human.”

The main consequence for this shift in perspective is a move towards a mindset of inventing the future as opposed to predicting the future.  For Smith, transhumanism tries to deterministically predict the future of the human species, in the process creating a “Last Man” dependence with a technologically mediated closed circle; and the hyperhumanist tries to openly create the future by fully including our embodied relation to the world, while at the same time recognising the new form of becoming that has been made possible by our technology.  

(1.30) Thomas Hamelryck

Girardian theorist Thomas Hamelryck situates Nietzsche’s work in the context of a dialectic with René Girard.  For Hamelryck this dialectic is necessitated by the sociological analysis of Émile Durkheim, which suggests that humans cycle between two distinct forms of time, profane and sacred.  Profane time is characterised by prohibition and renunciation, and sacred time is characterised by transgression and intoxication.  Here in the dialectic Nietzsche stands for sacred time, of transgression and intoxication, and Girard stands for profane time, of prohibition and renunciation:⁶⁷

“I argue that Nietzsche’s philosophy is a desperate plea for sacred time, while offering precious little understanding of the function of profane time or the nature of desire and violence.  Nietzsche rejects Christianity because it rejects Dionysian victimisation, which he sees as an inherent and valuable part of sacred time.  Instead, Nietzsche offers the fever dream of eternally recurring ecstasy and self-divinisation through the warped rebirth of the Dionysian. [...] I bring Nietzsche in dialogue with his anthropological antipode, René Girard, and his theory of mimetic desire and the victimage mechanism (ritual sacrifice of human scapegoats as a way to appease intra-tribal violence).  In contrast to Nietzsche, Girard’s work is a plea for profane time, while rejecting sacred time wholesale due to its association with the violence of the Dionysian.” 

From this distinction Hamelryck warns us of the danger of an undialectical notion of sacred time, but at the same time the necessity of sacred time, as essential for connecting with our real desire and ritual.  Without the dangers of sacred time, profane time becomes dead and empty, and thus it is inescapable if we are really going to live with the reality of what we are.  However, for Hamelryck, this means Nietzsche himself needs to be nested within both the profane tradition that he rejects — Hegelian dialectics and German idealism — as well as the profane tradition he inspires — Freudian psychoanalysis and Girardian anthropology.  If we think about Nietzsche undialectically, we risk death traps; but if we think about Nietzsche dialectically, we can not only avoid the stupidity of sacrificial scapegoating, but also explore many rich opportunities fo sacred time:⁶⁸

“Nietzsche and his spiritual kin remind us of the inescapable siren call of sacred time, with its transgressions, transformation, ecstasies and violence — its rich opportunities and its death traps.  However, the sacred might be inescapable, but the stupidity of sacrificial scapegoating might not.  In any case, every epoch is invited to turn the distorted voices that come to us from within sacred time into delightful singers — or perish in the erupting miasma of the untransformed Chtonic.”    

The Field of Nietzschean Interpretation (Original)

Nietzschean Interpretation (The Stoa)

Abyssal Arrows (Anthology)

Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Course)

1. The following article is a radical extension/expansion of an article published in 2022 in preparation for a course on Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

2. Freud, S. 1914. On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement. Freud – Complete Works. p. 2884.

3. Heidegger, M. 1961. Nietzsche Volumes III and IV – The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics. Harper San Francisco. p. 3-4.

4. Bataille, G. 1992. On Nietzsche. The Athlone Press. p. xvii.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Girard, R. 2010. Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre. Michigan State University Press.

8. Ibid. p. 82.

9. Foucault, M. 1977. Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Cornell University Press.  p. 162.

10. Ibid. p. 163.

11. Ibid.

12. Camus, A. 1955. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Vintage Books.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Sartre, J. 1943. Being and Nothingness. Philosophical Library. p. xlv.

16. Ibid. p. xlvi.

17. Document titled “A Candid Camera of Ayn Rand,” ARC Carton 86 Folder 18-16.

18. Rand, A. 2005. Q&A “The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age,” The Ayn Rand Program radio series, April 5, 1962. in Ayn Rand Answers, Mayhew, R. (Eds.). New York: New American Library. p. 117.

19. Rand, A. 1964. Objectivism vs. Nietzscheanism. Ayn Rand on Campus radio program. December 13, 1964.

20. Ricoeur, P. 1965. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. p. 32.

21. Ibid. p. 34.

22. Ibid. p. 35.

23. Deleuze, G. 1962. Nietzsche and Philosophy. London: Continuum. p. 6-7.

24. Ibid. p. 85.

25. Jung, C.G. 1971. Psychological Types. Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Volume 6. Princeton University Press. p. 148.

26. Lacan, J. 2005. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 106-7.

27. Ibid. p. 307.

28. Derrida, J. 1994. Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge. p. 16.

29. Ibid. p. 7.

30. Irigaray, L. 1998. Veiled Lips. In: Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche. The Pennsylvania State University Press. p. 82.

31. Ibid. p. 81.

32. Land, N. 2012. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Urbanomic. p. 72.

33. Ibid. p. 158.

34. Ibid. p. 159.

35. Ibid. p. 162.

36. Dennett, D. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life. Penguin Books. p. 461.

37. Ibid. p. 464-5.

38. More, M. 2010. The Overhuman in the Transhuman. Journal of Evolution & Technology, 21(1): p. 1.

39. Ibid. p. 2.

40. Ibid. p. 3.

41. Sloterdijk, P. 2011. Bubbles: Spheres Volule I: Microspherology. Semiotext(E). p. 24.

42. Ibid. p. 26-7.

43. Badiou, A. 2012. Philosophy for Militants. London: Verso.

44. Ibid.

45. Zupančič, A. 2003. The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. MIT Press. p. 3.

46. Ibid. p. 4.

47. Ibid. p. 5.

48. Brasier, R. 2007. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 205-6.

49. Ibid. p. 206-7.

50. Ibid. p. 223.

51. Bard, A. & Söderqvist, J. 2023. Process and Event. Futurica Media. p. 104.

52. Reshe, J. 2023. Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive. Palgrave macmillan. p. 106.

53. Ibid. p. 107.

54. Ibid.

55. Tutt, D. 2023. How To Read Like A Parasite: How The Left Got High on Nietzsche. Repeater. p. 3-4.

56. Ibid. p. 5.

57. Adalin, T. 2023. Paradox & Spiritual Leadership. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 421-2.

58. Ibid. p. 422.

59. Rose, O.G. 2024. Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose. p. 38-9.

60. Ibid. p. 39-40.

61. Ebert, A. 2023. Excess/Absence: The Mask of the Child. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 275-6.

62. Ibid. p. 298-9.

63. Pascal, L. 2023. Nietzsche = Tragedy + Time, or: Of What is Zarathustra the Prophet? In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 141-2.

64. Ibid. p. 147.

65. Smith, C.H. 2023. Overbecoming: Hyperhumanism as a Bridge Towards Interbeing. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 550-1.

66. Ibid. p. 554.

67. Hamelryck, T. 2023. Nietzsche’s tantra and Girard’s sutra. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 171-2.

68. Ibid. p. 205.