"If Only To Appear Worthy of It”: A Christian Contemplation of Nietzsche’s New Image of Man (Part 1)
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"If Only To Appear Worthy of It”: A Christian Contemplation of Nietzsche’s New Image of Man (Part 1)
Dorothy Rhoads
While the Christian call is to live worthy of the life of God,[1] Nietzsche’s call is to live worthy of the death of God. In his Parable of the Madman, Nietzsche challenged the modern man to proportionately respond to God’s demise: “Must we not become gods ourselves, if only to appear worthy of it?”[2] Nietzsche did his best to dictate and embody this existence. He enumerated a standard against which individual worth is determined and he established a bar by which the success of an attempt can be measured. In a desperate attempt to provide meaning to nihilistic Europe in the wake of Darwinism, Nietzsche presented his philosophical new man as the sole possessor of vision and worth in light of God’s death.
Though Nietzsche’s new image of man is a strategic contradiction of the Christian picture, it represents his aspiration to goals embodied in the divinely granted image of God. In this way, Nietzsche’s new image of man is a corrupted picture of the image of God. In place of God and knowledge of him, Nietzsche established the Ubermensch. He traded divine grace for the will to power, and he sacrificed eternal perfection for eternal recurrence. Upon each of these philosophical substructures, Nietzsche built his new image of man, but at the foundation, he lacked the meaning, power and joy that is inherent to the Biblical model.
Nietzsche’s New Image of Man
Among other reasons, the brilliance of Nietzsche’s philosophy is that it is both innovative and reactive. Having judged that previous conceptions of reality had collapsed with the death of God, Nietzsche formulated his own. In what Hollingdale calls Nietzsche’s “new image of man,”[3] Nietzsche painted a picture of what he judged to be the sole embodiment of a meaningful and successful existence. His philosophical picture represents his attempt to distinguish man from the animal through the will to power. Rather than being subject to God, nature or any force including himself, Nietzsche’s man is empowered to be creator, determining his own reality and establishing his own standard. Nietzsche’s ideal man is embodied in the Ubermensch, who is driven and defined by the will to power over every threatening force and who embraces life to its fullest extent, even to the point of delighting in the prospect of eternal recurrence.
Ubermensch
Having become concerned that Darwin had nailed shut God’s coffin and obliterated the distinction between man and animal, Nietzsche sought to produce a contemplative solution that was independent of the supernatural and explicitly void of morality; by creating the Ubermensch, Nietzsche granted meaning and substance to man by distinguishing him from the animal and making him God. Humanity, Nietzsche explained, is simply a bridge between the animal and the Ubermensch, and those who are incapable of possessing the qualities of the Ubermensch possess no more worth than an animal.[4] Most of humanity is bound in the prison of morality and constrained by religious and societal prejudices, but the Ubermensch knows no such restrictions.[5] He is, Nietzsche proudly declared, the greater man, the overcomer, the Ubermensch; he is the “new ‘image of man.’”[6] This new image denies the existence of God and finds in himself the ability and power to create a life worthy of such a figure.
With honest contemplation that his contemporaries lacked, Nietzsche recognized that the result of “the disappearance of the ‘regulating finger of God’ from the world” would be chaos.[7] Nietzsche reckoned that the death of God would result in vacuous living and inescapable meaninglessness unless the Ubermensch rises to the occasion by fixing his own goal, aspiring to his own ideal and creating his own reality. Essentially, Nietzsche’s philosophy “was an attempt to produce a new world-picture which took Darwinism into account but was not nullified by it.”[8] In an act of rising to this task, Nietzsche formulated his new image of man in order to “stand against the growing nihilism of modern Europe” and effect a transformation of certain men that turned them from being equivalent to an animal into being equivalent to God.[9]
With God dead, the Ubermensch is his successor.[10] Standing over God’s grave, Nietzsche took up the divine mantle and declared that God’s authority, value, creative power and privileged autonomy were in his own hands and in the hands of fellow overcomers. If the reader listens closely, the thrill in Nietzsche’s voice can be heard as he explained this new reality to the few who were capable of understanding his war cry and joining in his brigade. “Once you said ‘God’ when you gazed upon distant seas; but now I have taught you to say ‘Ubermensch.’”[11] Practically, this is accomplished when the Ubermensch’s will to power is operative, and both his own humanity and the external forces warring against him are mastered.
Will to Power
Nietzsche’s new image of man revolves around his fundamental commitment to cooperate with and be driven by the will to power. Though the will to power is philosophically unique to Nietzsche, it developed as a partial divergence from Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Schopenhauer identified an antithesis between the intellect and the will.[12] Since the nature of the will to life is to exist in perpetual conflict with other wills simultaneously seeking their own advancement, willing results in striving and subsequent conflict and suffering. The will, then, is identified as the cause of inevitable unhappiness because the will to life and its miserable consequences are unavoidable. The intrinsic, inescapable and incurable evil of life characterizes Schophenhauer’s philosophy as one of pessimism.[13] While in many ways Nietzsche, too, was pessimistic, he broke with Schopenhauer at a monumental juncture. Whereas Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the primacy of the will taught that the will produces suffering and must be escaped, Nietzshce believed in the will and the drive to power as the very meaning of life. The will is not, according to Nietzsche, the will to life, but the will to power.[14] Nietzsche agreed that much of life is suffering, but suffering itself is the key to happiness, because suffering positions the will to exert power, and the meaning of life is power in operation.[15] The will to power is especially operative in the Ubermensch’s knowing and mastering of himself and exerting dominance over every external force.
As God’s successor, the new image of man must be mastered by and dependent upon no one. The death of God marked the death of the metaphysical need for other worlds and the ability to get in touch with an outside being. As a result, everything needed by man must come from within.[16] Naturally, then, rather than placing confidence and hope in divine grace to effect transformative power over personal deficiencies, Nietzsche’s hope was in man’s own will to power. Nietzsche acknowledged that even the Ubermensch was far from perfection, so his existence needed to be one of continual striving, overcoming and overpowering. The Ubermensch would never achieve perfection, but he would achieve perpetual opportunities for power.
Eternal Recurrence
In light of the supremacy of the Ubermensch and the central place of the will to power in his philosophy, Nietzsche conceived of a culminating theory to explain the world and simultaneously accept it.[17] Fascinatingly, Nietzsche recognized that the human heart possesses a craving for eternity, and his doctrine of eternal recurrence creates an eternity conditioned for his new image of man.[18] Nietzsche’s philosophy required a doctrine that both legitimatized an embrace of suffering for all of eternity and glorified the possession of power to bear up any circumstance. His solution was eternal recurrence.
Eternal recurrence is Nietzsche’s self-conceived doctrine that all events repeat themselves an infinite number of times for all of eternity. All that has been experienced, is being experienced and will be experienced is part of the cycle that will continue forever without change or improvement. The doctrine first emerges in The Gay Science and features most prominently in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.[19] When life is lived to the fullest, eternal recurrence is embraced. In a sense, then, Nietzsche established eternal recurrence as a litmus test judging a person’s attitude toward life.[20] The Ubermensch is neither discouraged by nor fearful of eternal recurrence, but instead accepts and relishes in the endless repetition as a way to say an eternal “Yes” to life.[21] He invites and embraces the recurrence of pain because with it comes the increase of power and thus the recurrence of happiness. Though Nietzsche prided himself in his unflinching embrace of pain, it is noteworthy that pain is not welcomed for pain’s sake but because it is understood to be an irreplaceable component of a joyful life.[22] Pain achieves for man something greater by conditioning him to bear up under what is difficult. Pain sharpens the Ubermensch’s ability to exercise the will to power, and so, he is then properly placed to also experience what is pleasant.[23] Eternal recurrence has been named the crown of Nietzsche’s philosophy and the culmination of his alternative to nihilism. Yet rather than solving the problem of nihilism with eternal recurrence, Nietzsche magnified it. By rejecting morality and therefore closing the door on the hope for perfection, Nietzsche was left with no alternative but meaninglessness. Nietzsche’s new image of man represents a perverted attempt to reach what is only provided in the Biblical image of God.
Notes:
[1] Eph. 4:1; Col. 1:10.
[2] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Kevin Hill (London: Penguin Classics, 2018), 134.
[3] R.J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 163.
[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Clancy Martin (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005), 11. “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman a rope oven an abyss.”
[5] Giuseppe Fornari, A God Torn to Pieces: The Nietzsche Case (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 99.
[6] Hollingdale, Nietzsche, 163.
[7] Hollingdale, Nietzsche, 167. One problem with Nietzsche’s theory, as the history of the twentieth century demonstrated, is that the existence of goals and determined purpose alone does not minimize chaos but rather focuses and localizes it.
[8] Ibid., 73.
[9] Ibid., 163.
[10] Ibid., 163.
[11] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 75. It should be emphasized that Nietzsche did not disbelieve in the need for God, but rather judged the Ubermensch as the one fit to his task. Nietzsche saw the Ubermensch as the only hope to lift man out of a meaningless existence produced by the death of God.
[12] Julian Young, A Philosophical Biography Friedrich Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 93.
[13] Hollingdale, Nietzsche: Man and Philosophy, 69.
[14] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 101.
[15] Hollingdale, Nietzsche: Man and Philosophy, 70, 183.
[16] Duane Armitage, Heidegger and the Death of God (Scranton: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 2.
[17] Hollingdale, Nietzsche: Man and Philosophy, 145. “Nietzsche arrived at the theory of the eternal recurrence as a consequence of two requirements: the need to explain the world and the need to accept it.”
[18] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 279. “’But all joy wants eternity, wants deep, deep, deep eternity!’”
[19] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 220.
[20] Nietzsche did not insist that this doctrine reflects reality, but he challenges every individual to contemplate how they would react if it did.
[21] Robert Solomon, Living with Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship, 2005), 13.
[22] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 278. “Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together.”
[23] Hollingdale, Nietzsche: Man and Philosophy, 167. Hollingdale describes Nietzsche’s belief this way: “The evil and pain in his life then become a positive good, since they were necessary for the achievement of this one supreme moment: if one event were subtracted, everything following would be different…The life to aim for is the life containing the greatest amount of joy – and joy is the feeling that power increases, that an obstacle is overcome.”
