as to suggest that humanity as a whole does have, and always has had, a goal. It just required a more ‘rigorous examination’ to identify it (H3.189). The most famous instance of such ideas is probably Z1.15 ‘On the Thousand Goals and the One’. Each type of people or culture has a goal, which is the sustaining and perfection of those virtues that made it into a people or culture. However, only now is it possible to envisage a single goal for all cultures and peoples: the overhuman. N sometimes uses the term ideal to express an idea similar to this highest, future goal.
god, gods
In the early work that employs the concepts of Apollonian and Dionysian, the Greek gods are an ‘artistic middle world’ developed to allow insight into but simultaneously also veil the horrors of existence. They are, then, N’s first solution to problem of the peculiarly Greek combination of cheerfulness and pessimism (BT3). The point is generalizable: religious objects of worship are in some way a projection of the needs of a people. In Greek religion, this projection is of health and the affirmation of life; in other religions (Christianity most notably) this projection is of the needs of weakness, illness and revenge. On N’s account, more harmful than any theism per se is monotheism. Monotheism represents a detachment of religious beliefs and practices from the life of a people, the mummification of ideals and conceptions of value in abstract concepts, the crushing of the concept of man (and likewise, body, sense, passion) beneath an impossible ideal and thus also the ‘premature stagnation’ of human development (these ideas are found, variously, at GS143, Z3.8.2, TIReason1; AC16–19, 25). Additionally, in such passages, monotheism is often termed ‘Asiatic’ in contrast to the Hellenic (e.g. H1.114, Z4.6), bringing the history of religions into line with N’s observations about the influences and movements of peoples and cultures. (Importantly, the teaching of
Jesus himself as described in AC is something quite different.)
The metaphysical ground of any positing of the existence of God lies in Platonism in a very broad sense. This means, for example, the positing of another ‘world’ in contrast to this world of becoming, or the positing of true being as individual and substantial, thinking in terms of subject and predicate logic (thus N’s famous claim that
‘we have not got rid of God because we still have faith in grammar’ TIReason5; see also BGE54). At AC47, N clarifies that his primary concern is not, however, with the issue of whether a God exists or not, but the kind of values necessarily associated with or at the origin of faith: this monotheistic faith is a ‘crime against life’ (and see TIMorality4, EHDestiny7).
Monotheism is contrasted to polytheism (especially Greek) at GM2.23 (and see H1.114). The gods are generally understood as symbols of the diversity of human ideals – and this diversity is itself a healthy thing (H2.220, AC55). Polytheism was a product of the drive to stubborn selfishness (GS143), but also the ennobling of that previously unproductive drive. A parallel historical narrative is outlined in GM2.19: in a primeval period, the gods originated out of fear of the power of ancestors (or nature: H1.111). However, in a later, noble stage of development, this fear was transformed into piety and the gods were projected ideals of one’s own noble qualities. Similarly, N argues in BT that it was a multiplicity of Greek god-ideals (Apollo and Dionysus especially) that gave Greek culture its dynamism and its highest achievements. In contrast, the Socratic eliminates this multiplicity and thus prepares the way for monotheism.
Among the most famous of N’s ideas is the ‘death of God’. By this is meant a number of related historical phenomena: (i) the decline of any real, direct significance of theism (N primarily means Christianity) for European culture – which is to say the increasing secularization of moral, social and political institutions; (ii) or similarly, the rise of scepticism about, for example, the literal truth of sacred texts or the relevance of religious observances, which in turn leads to an increasingly attenuated Christianity (see BGE53); (iii) likewise the rise of avowed atheism; (iv) the increasingly obvious irrationality of Christian beliefs on a philosophical or scientific analysis (e.g. BGE54); (v) the broadly Hegelian concept of the ‘evolving god’ – that is, the deity as the gradual realization of the absolute in human history and consciousness, which removes any religious content from the concept (H1.238, and see UM1); (vi) what N sees as the rise of a new kind of ‘free spirit’ who sees Christianity as not simply irrelevant or wrong but positively dangerous to the health and growth of the human (AC47). Importantly, the free spirit is not identified with atheism per se. Atheism, N often contends, is blissfully unaware of both the implications of the ‘death of god’ (GS125), or of the continuing although indirect influence of
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religious concepts and values – for example, on notions of human rights, equality or democracy, but also even in science (e.g. H1.131, GS344). If Christianity involves a degradation of man, then the death of God was ‘murder’, a revenge on the omniscient one who could be ‘witness’ to human abjectness (Z4.7).
The concept of Dionysus in the later N suggests a new conception of the gods. This is neither the unthinking negation that is atheism (BGE295), nor founded on fear or revenge. ‘Even the gods philosophise’ N writes (again, at BGE295), suggesting that Dionysus is not a transcendent entity who views the world from outside of it, or who is unchanging. Rather, N’s new god or ideal here is a projection of his longing for human development and a heightening of nobility. ‘Some god in you’ led you to your godless piety, the last Pope says to Zarathustra (Z4.6). Because of this new relation, N terms himself a ‘disciple’ of Dionysus (TIAncients5, EHP2). Indeed, the idea is sometimes expressed that one must become a god (GS125, Z4.6). This means to align oneself – in affirmation, joy and freedom from shame (Z1.7, 3.12.2) – with the nature of the will to power so as to become an embodiment of this ideal. In EH N ironically uses concepts that refer to Christ in order to discuss this idea. For example, incarnation (EHDestiny1, 2); or the splitting of historical dating into before and after (8). But here, the god become human is not an instance of something that was originally, and remains, somehow transcendent to reality, but ‘it is reality itself’ (5). The Dionysian ideal belongs to the real (it is immanent), and does not come from ‘outside’ (and see 1887.10.138).
goethe
Towering literary and intellectual figure in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and one of the few persons in recent cultural life for whom N had virtually unqualified respect. Goethe was resolutely independent from literary fashion – a pioneer of Romanticism in his early work, a classicist later when all around him were Romantics. Likewise, he was independent both from Christian traditions, and from the unthinking atheism of free thinkers. Moreover, Goethe was deeply fascinated by both the zoological and physical sciences. In Faust he portrayed the endlessly striving human being, rescued from his pact with Mephistopheles by ‘the eternal feminine’ (see entry on feminine and masculine).
good
See morality.
gratitude (thankfulness, etc.)
Dankbarkeit. Gratitude is an important element within N’s account
of affirmation. In part, the notion comes from Epicurus (e.g. ‘Letter to Menoeceus’, and see H1.223). Also, in part, it stems from N’s analysis of ancient Greek, and other pre-Christian, religions (BGE49, AC16) – where gratitude is in contrast to a religion built on cruelty (BGE55), or on fear and bad conscience (GM2.19). Gratitude is the defining feature of the antiquarian historian, one of the modes of historical remembering and forgetting that ‘serves life’ (UM2.3). Gratitude is noble (H1.366), and handling gratitude badly is akin to the contempt found in pity (D138). The ability to express gratitude is the work of a mature culture that has a great deal to be thankful for (GS100). Towards the end of Z, Zarathustra realizes that the higher humans are ‘becoming thankful’ Z4.17.1 – that is, are overcoming their fears and ressentiment.
N often expresses his profound gratitude even to those cultural movements or systems of value that, in other ways, he despises (e.g. to Platonic dogmatism at BGEP, to ascetic rejection of life’s most familiar aspects at GM3.12, or to the specific illness that is Wagner at WCP). N’s immoral attitude to history – arguing that what is called good has an origin in the evil, or vice versa – means that there are few phenomena to be universally condemned. This he sometimes calls justice. But in this case gratitude is more than simply a just appraisal, it also includes a concept of fate. If in the present there are new, future possibilities for human development, then the entirety of human history up to that point has made it so. It is in this way that the notion of gratitude is part of affirmation, and specifically, amor fati.