I usually walk past
library shelves with a vigilant eye, scanning titles
as I go. Now and then, magic strikes. An unfamiliar
and attractive title appears and compels me to stop.
In seconds I've pulled the book from the shelf and
decided I have to read it, even if it disrupts my
current reading priorities.
In this case, it
was the title in its bold white type on the purple
spine that caught my eye as I passed through the
stacks on my way to the circulation desk.
"Mask" aroused curiosity.
"Enlightenment" was still on my working
agenda. When "Nietzsche" showed in the
subtitle on the cover, I clutched it and took it
along without missing a step.
Surely I could
handle one more interrogation of postmodern roots,
although long since I had closed my "postmodern
programme." Much as I had come to appreciate the
generative role of Nietzsche's texts in the account
of postmodernism, his bombast and the esoteric
quality of comments on him (notably Heidegger's)
still made his significance less than transparent to
me.
Stanley Rosen's
book looked like a promise of transparency. Sure
enough, when I read it I entered one of those rare
romances with a text that seems written just for me.
Rosen's take on Nietzsche the proto-postmodernist
cleared away some of the smoke surrounding his ideas.
More important, Rosen clarified the cultural dilemma
of the Enlightenment in a manner that other writers,
such as Horkheimer and Adorno, had done
unsatisfactorily for me.
With a text like
this, you want to copy the whole thing out and let it
speak to you with its own voice. You don't want to
drag it through the dust of paraphrase and summary.
But an account
of this reading in my postmodern records is
necessary. If I can capture Rosen's "mask"
metaphor and his view of Nietzsche's doctrine of
"the eternal return of the same," that will
enrich not only my reflections on postmodernism but
also my ongoing thinking about the
Enlightenment--that ghostly illumination that now
intensifies in new work on contemporary
"globalization."
This book is an
interpretive reading of Thus
Spake Zarathustra. In Rosen's
view, Zarathustra gathers
in the main parts of Nietzsche's complete
revolutionary project. That completeness is
particularly valuable to me because Rosen from the
start situates Nietzsche in a decisive ancestral
relationship with postmodernism.
Nietzsche,
more so than Feuerbach, Marx, or other great
figures of the nineteenth century, initiates
what Heidegger called the Destruktion
of the tradition, and it
is of course Heidegger's version of
Nietzsche's Destruktion that
underlies the deconstruction disseminated by
Derrida and his students to the
English-speaking world. (vii)
Make no mistake
about Rosen's allegiances. He does not come to
canonize Nietzsche as the patron saint of
postmodernism. Such retroactive sainthood would
freeze Nietzsche in a 1970s orthodoxy of which, a
century earlier, he knew nothing. (viii) Nor does
Rosen come to argue that Nietzsche's thought
succeeded in its rash goal to extinguish the
Enlightenment and to confer on humanity a new vision
of superman. Rosen concludes that "Nietzsche's
most profound insights are sustained by nothing more
than the reverberations of chaos." (248) And he
believes that, because of his ancestral role in
energizing postmodernism, Nietzsche contributed
heavily to the deterioration of philosophical thought
in the second half of the twentieth century. (250)
But Rosen's
minute attention to Zarathustra
is not an exercise in rejection. He believes that
reading Nietzsche today serves a useful purpose.
Today, he suggests, (as postmodernist heroes grow
tired, and we grow tired of them), thinkers must
reconstitute reason so that they will be able
"to perceive once more the common root of truth
and goodness." (250)
It is
time to reexamine the Enlightenment with open
eyes, free of ideology and jargon, whether
this jargon stems from poetry or mathematics.
At his best, this is the direction in which
Nietzsche points us. (250)
I hear hope in
this positive assessment of Nietzsche. Rosen hopes
that we will find a fresh way to think about the
post-postmodern moment that we now have entered. His
analysis of Zarathustra
does not in itself pretend to open that new way of
thinking, but it purges the air. How did Nietzsche
identify the dilemma of the Enlightenment? What did
he propose to do about it? Rosen's insights into
these questions suggest that, as the twenty-first
century begins and postmodern excitement wanes, a
revaluation of values that draws energy from
Nietzsche's century-old thoughts already has a head
of steam.
Through Rosen's
interpretation of Zarathustra,
I was able to take another look at the over-all
project that Nietzsche pursued. This sharpened my
sense of the magnitude of Nietzsche's two grand
goals. (1) He sought to discredit and destroy the
metanarrative (not his term) that had driven Western
civilization for two millennia. He targeted in
particular the dilemma of belief and behavior
resulting from the Enlightenment, which brought the
Platonic-Christian tradition, in his view, to a
hopeless impasse. (2) He sought to promulgate a new
metanarrative of his devising that would set
civilization on a right course.
In the character
of Zarathustra, Nietzsche created a prophet and
lawgiver whose role it was to body forth the new
story of humankind. This story at one level would
lead the masses to a new life. At a deeper level it
would lead a "happy few" thinkers with
clear vision to understand the awesome reality
underlying that new life.
You have to
follow Rosen's close reading of the Zarathustra
text from start to finish to get the full import of
this grand project. My purpose here is not to
recapitulate that whole Nietzschean project! Mainly
from Rosen's interpretation I took a better
understanding of two central ideas that anchor
Nietzsche's project. In the remaining paragraphs, I
simply attempt to record what I have taken from Rosen
on those two ideas.
The first idea
is that of the "mask of Enlightenment" of
the title. The idea of the "mask"
facilitates Rosen's explication of Nietzsche's first
goal—to destroy the prevailing foundation of
Western civilization.
The second idea
is that Nietzsche's doctrine of "the eternal
return of the same" is a mythical illusion. He
proposed to install it in place of the
Platonic-Christian myth of eternity. The idea of
eternal return as a mythical illusion facilitates
Rosen's explication of Nietzsche's second
goal—to promulgate a new metanarrative that
would set things right. (The doctrine of eternal
return would lead to creativity and replace the
Platonic-Christian slave doctrine that sapped the
creativity of humankind and saddled it with lifeless
ideas.)
Unmasking the
Enlightenment
Nietzsche attacked the
existing order by examining what he thought were its
truth and its lies. The truth, in his view, was that
chaos, not order, lay at the heart of things. Western
civilization held up in front of this truth a lie in
the form of a mask. It was the mask of the
Enlightenment. The Enlightenment held that reason and
scientific inquiry would reveal an orderly truth in
the cosmos. The freedom of humankind would progress
as the inquiry went forward. Along the way,
humankind's dependence on the irrrationality of
traditional religious and philosophical myths would
wither. The Enlightenment's root insight, its prizing
of rationality, derived, Nietzsche said, from the
Greek tradition of Plato and Socrates and its
transmission through Christianity.
This
Enlightenment vision in Nietzsche's view was a
rhetorical deception. While it promised progress, the
rational methods of the Enlightenment were stripping
away human vitality. The rhetorical mask of the
Enlightenment, which celebrated progress, concealed
"the dissolution of confidence in the solidity,
even in the actuality, of the everyday world"
(2) This dissolution was occurring as the consequence
of the Enlightenment's own pursuit of scientific and
mathematical thought, which reduced all things to the
same dead measure (2). Behind the mask of the
Enlightenment, the Enlightenment itself was showing
that chaos, not order, reigned. (7)
The mask of
reason and scientific progress worn by the
Enlightenment had disastrous consequences, as
Nietzsche saw it. It was drying up the creative
juices of humankind and leading it into impotence and
vulgarity. It is worth quoting Rosen's catalog of the
decadence that Nietzsche identified and sought to
destroy:
The
rank-ordering of aristocratic virility has been
replaced by egalitarianism; the ruthlessness that is
the necessary accompaniment of creation has
evaporated into liberal sentimentality; science and
technology have combined with secular or effeminate
Christianity to produce a society of bourgeois
philistines. The love of danger gives way to the love
of comfort; the desire to overcome is replaced by the
pursuit of comfortable satisfaction, both physical
and spiritual. (4)
It was one thing
for Nietzsche to identify this crisis of
civilization. It was quite another to destroy it. All
of Nietzsche's bombast and rhetorical fireworks and
then some were needed for the heroic task. This was
not a mere literary challenge for Nietzsche. It was a
deadly personal mission that consumed him heart and
soul. The madcap antics of his prophet Zarathustra
represented the author's uncompromising urge to
unmask the old world and initiate a new epoch.
As Rosen put it,
"Nietzsche wishes to remove the tattered mask of
late-modern European civilization from the face of
chaos in order to replace it with a new and vital
one." (60)
Rosen helped me
to unravel the complexity of Nietzsche's notion of
chaos. Chaos for Nietzsche was the essential truth
underlying human existence. It was the awesome truth
of chaos that provoked the palliative lie of the
Enlightenment.
Chaos was not
merely a cosmological condition. It permeated all
existence, even the personal identity of the
individual subject. The individual did not cohere
around an immortal soul but, for Nietzsche, was
chaotic--unstable, perpetually in motion. There was
no individual "Being." There was only
"Becoming." (56)
For Nietzsche,
Heraclitus's vision of flux trumped Parmenides's
vision of atomistic permanence. The flux, moreover,
had no purpose, no end, no teleological tendency.
Rosen says that Nietzsche's idea of the cosmos,
"or what we take to be order, is just the
purposeless play of chaos." (57)
Nietzsche held
that science erroneously promised to discover the
order of the cosmos. There was no order for it to
discover. The laws that it promulgated resulted from
the human will to make
order. The laws of science thus were "a version
of art,...an expression of the fundamentally
constructive character of human experience."
(58)
But that
constructive impulse led humans ever and always
"to conceal inner chaos with spiritual
productions that impose anthropomorphic order on the
play of forces." (59) Nietzsche's project was
doomed to political failure, as Rosen explicates it.
Nietzsche aimed to unmask chaos and thus regenerate
humankind. However, Rosen says, the free spirits in a
new future would be no more able than present
philosophers to address their fellow citizens without
masks. They too would be ostracized if they exposed
the blunt truth of chaos. Or, if they were
understood, that truth would "lead to the
destruction of the new epoch." (60) Spiritual
productions of some sort would forever arise to mask
chaos.
The political
impossibility of Nietzsche's project did not negate
the excitement of his idea. More than a century
later, we still are trying to see through the mask of
the Enlghtenment. Some insist that they glimpse
something like the order that Nietzsche denied. Some
see nothing promising there and revel, meanwhile, in
their artful constructions of meaning. They behave as
if the productions of their imagination provide the
only order there can be.
Inventing a
"nobler" lie--the eternal return of the
same
The doctrine of the
eternal return of the same is the central theme of Thus
Spake Zarathustra, said Rosen
(177). I have pondered this hardest and most
important thought of Nietzsche's in my reading of
postmodern texts. At infrequent moments during my
pondering, I have heard myself say, "Aha! I get
it." But by the time I have tried to spread out
my understanding in a paragraph, the flash of light
has flickered and disappeared. By placing the
doctrine at the center of Nietzsche's grand project
(not the only commentator to do so, of course), Rosen
compelled me once again to try to untangle its
significance. And he helped somewhat.
Rosen makes us
see the critical connection between the doctrine of
eternal return and what Nietzsche had set out to do.
Nietzsche's project was, first, to destroy the
prevailing Western culture and, second, to provide
the basis for a new one. Specifically, he was trying
to destroy the Christian culture that reflected the
Platonic-Socratic rationality of Greece. A key
component of the Christian culture was its myth of
eternal life, attainable through redemption.
Nietzsche proposed to substitute the doctrine of
eternal return for the Christian doctrine of eternal
life.
This myth of
eternal return was essential for Nietzsche's project.
First, it allowed him to insist upon chaos as the
fundamental reality. Second, in spite of chaos and
the nihilism to which it pointed, it allowed
Nietzsche to confer on human beings a new
belief--however illusory in the end--that they could
take positive action with freedom and creativity. It
allowed him to imagine exhorting the masses to
abandon the decadent way of life in the Christian
West and revitalize themselves through his new
vision.
Rosen goes to
great length to explicate the doctrine of eternal
return. He does so in his analysis of Zarathustra's
speeches in the section titled "On the Vision
and the Riddle" (177-189). For reasons that will
become apparent shortly, I do not find it necessary
to summarize in any adequate way Rosen's picture of
the doctrine of eternal return in action. However, it
is worth noting a couple of features in that picture
to get the flavor.
(1) The
"central image" discussed by Zarathustra
with the dwarf in this section is the "gateway
of the moment" (Augenblick).
It takes an act of will to enter the gateway of the
moment. By that act of will you are able to enter
into the operation of eternal return. Imagine
yourself swallowing your fears and doubts and making
the fateful decision to step into the gateway. You
find yourself in a dynamic temporal situation. Within
the gateway, you are standing in the present moment.
Now, however, you are compelled to walk forward from
the gateway into the future. And you are compelled
simultaneously to walk backward into the past. All
the while you remain standing in the present within
the gateway. With the clear vision conferred by your
act of will, you see that all that will happen in
front of you has happened already behind you. What
you have experienced you will experience, a process
that has no ending. You are experiencing "an
eternal or perpetual temporality"--repetition
forever. This supersedes the outcome of the
discredited doctrine of Christian redemption, which
was "temporalized eternity"--an eternal
continuum (179).
(2) Rosen tries
to make this fantastic image more understandable. He
suggests that we have to refer to two kinds of
time--cosmological time and historical time--if we
are going to consider the gateway and the eternal
return meaningfully (178). The act of will--of
courage-- that places you in the gateway of the
moment takes place in cosmological time. There, the
chaos that prevails yields only to your act of will.
I take it that Rosen means that you will the gateway
itself into being. None of that can happen in mere
historical time. Once you step into the gateway,
however, you enter historical time and live out the
limited conditions that it entails. ("In one
sense, of course," Rosen says, "we are all
continuously passing through the gateway, namely, if
it is considered as an image of the structure of
temporal flow" [182]).
This approach to
time reveals severe problems with Nietzsche's attempt
to make his doctrine of eternal return clear. Rosen
explicates those problems, partly by comparing the
way the Christian doctrine of eternal life contrasts
with Nietzsche's doctrine. As I read through those
pages, I imagined myself still standing in the
gateway, running madly in both directions and
wondering where I was going.
(3) Nietzsche
said that the doctrine of eternal return of the same
would work as a new myth only if the masses
forgot it! If they remembered
it, they would see that their vaunted creativity and
originality were illusions, negated by the necessity
of eternal return. By forgetting it, they would
retain belief in their own powers and would strive to
achieve as if they were free.
(4) A final
feature of the doctrine worth noting is this: The
ground or foundation of Nietzsche's doctrine of
eternal return is "the abysmal thought"
(182). The abysmal thought, you might guess, is the
thought of chaos. I became momentarily intrigued by
the relationship of (a) the abysmal thought of chaos
on one hand and, (b) on the other, the doctrine of
the eternal return of the same (to
use the complete Nietzschean formulation). What is it
that returns eternally in a cosmos grounded on chaos?
Essentially--chaos.
So, I said to
myself, standing in the gateway of the moment,
running like hell forwards and backwards
simultaneously, I would be witnessing the return of
the chaos
that grounded all that went before and that would
recur eternally. I would not be witnessing the return
of an order of
eternally recurring events. I suppose that
Nietzsche--or Rosen on his behalf--would finesse this
dilemma by saying the following. Humans will order
into being in the teeth of chaos. What they willed
into being is what will be willed into being forever,
grounded eternally on the chaos that generated it.
I know, this is
beginning to sound absurd. So much for a list of some
features of the doctrine of eternal return of the
same. Let's cut to the short answer to the puzzle
posed by this most daunting of ideas. Rosen reveals
that Nietzsche's dirty little secret was that "the
eternal return...is itself an illusion"
(181).
It too is an
artful mask, another myth, another metanarrative. Its
function, Rosen reveals, was not "to enhance
historical existence but rather to validate the
repudiation of Platonism and Christianity"
(183). It too is a "noble lie" that will
continue to conceal the chaotic truth of becoming at
the heart of existence. In Nietzsche's view, it was a
nobler lie than those of the prevailing social and
cultural order.
Nietzsche
believed that the truth of chaos was intolerable as a
basis for human existence, according to Rosen.
Humanity needed "the lie that the identity of
chance and necessity on the one hand and the
accumulation and discharge of force on the other can
serve as the basis for a creative transvaluation of
values" (247).
The mask of the
Enlightenment, the mythical doctrine of the eternal
return of the same--Rosen in his attractive book gave
me new insight into these basic issues in Nietzsche's
revolutionary project. When I get around to
re-reading Thus Spake Zarathustra,
Rosen's text will be in my other hand.
