Date: Sun, 29 Jan 1995 01:55:35 -0500
From: Chris Hargens <ldmr-AT-cruzio.com>
Subject: 'the gods' in nietzsche's mature thought


"..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 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
millenia onto new paths.." etc
Consider the confusion of active/passive as approximate site of human
subjectivity [Daybreak 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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