File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_1998/nietzsche.9811, message 59


From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Date: Wed, 04 Nov 1998 00:10:54 -0500
Subject: Of Gods, their death and the etc.


Yes, Nietzsche baptized 'the highest of all possible faiths" as
_Dionysus_.  But that hardly suffices to make his case - for what he
reproaches the God that dies for is that it was a good one.  "There is
in fact no other alternative for Gods: _either_ they are the will to
power (...) _or_ else they necessarily become _good_..." (AC, 16).

Nietzsche's theory of the will to power was and is the first attempt to
think of the powers of Physis in terms of energy ('will to power'), in
terms of a physical God of the good and the bad, a God without a human
face, an overhuman God that couples forces as their genetic and
genealogical element.  He explicitly describes his doctrine of the
eternal recurrence, as a doctrine of the 'circulus vitiosus deus'.  The
physical functional principle of reality (the dynamic aether,
Nietzsche's quanta of power), God as supreme power, is what a gay
science and its physics must wrestle from metaphysics - it is only the
good God, the metaphysical God which is no more; and that God, yes, it
was nothingness itself - and belief in it but a pious lie:

"Let us remove supreme goodness from the concept of God: it is unworthy
of a god.  Let us also remove supreme wisdom: it is the vanity of
philosophers that is to be blamed for this mad notion of God as a
monster of wisdom: he had to be as like them as possible.  No!  God the
_supreme power_ - that suffices!  Everything follows from it, the
'world' follows from it!"

Yes, Zarathustra was 'merely an old atheist', but not Nietzsche.  Yes,
he was a Dionysiac but because the God he was talking about can be seen,
measured, described, retested - what he was missing was precisely a
higher science of physics than that afforded by a
mechanistic-probabilistic science in the service of the human form and
the disgusting self-exhibitionistic spectacle of its ignorance.  So, let
the old God rest in peace, read the last rites to this human herd and on
to the edge of Space!

Lambda Calisthenics

PS The _anti-natural_ castration of a God into a God of the merely good
would be totally undesirable here.  One has as much need of the evil God
as of the good God: for one does not owe one's existence to philanthropy
or tolerance precisely..."


	--- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005