Date: Tue, 7 Feb 1995 16:20:56 -0500
From: Chris Hargens <ldmr-AT-cruzio.com>
Subject: RE: Nietzsche                                                                                          


"..a reckless and amoral artist-god who wants to experience, whether he is
building or destroying, in the good and in the bad, his own joy and
glory...who in creating worlds frees himself from the distress of fullness
and overfullness, from the affliction of the contradictions compressed in
his soul. The world
[as if] at at every moment the *attained* salvation of God" etc...
So what happened to this 'god' [as gods, in the leeway and self-concealment
of humanity's negotiations with this excess of life] in Nietzsche's later
thought? Was the concept abandoned fundamentally, even as a useful device,
or did it continue to work, reworked and concealed in such a way as to
avoid any sort of philosophical idealism; e.g. by projecting it into and
through the concept of the exceptional individual, heralds and forerunners,
"..men of the future who in the present tie the knot and constraint which
compels the will of millennia on to *new* paths.." etc..
Consider the confusion of active/passive as approximate site of human
subjectivity [Daybread 120, 124, 130]; and the fact that setting all this
in terms of the individual, the body, 'the physiological' etc., allows N.
to refract it across his entire critique of Platonism.
In short, I'm asking if there may not be a tragic-philosophical concept of
'the gods' available in N.'s mature thought, though concealed in this
refraction.

        William Thomas



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