The Faith Column

5 comments from readers

Dan
09 November 2007 at 16:20

In the Spring of 1872 in London Canada (formerly Kotequogong on the shores of the Askunessippi), a rather remarkable man by the name of Maurice Bucke suffered an experience not at all unlike that which Friedrich Nietzsche would undergo nine years afterward beside the lake of Silvaplana in the summer of 1881. And, like Nietzsche, Bucke took this experience as a call to thought -- indeed a call to re-evaluate himself and his values: a new 'cosmogony' of sorts, understanding the word 'cosmos' here in its original Pythagorean sense of a principle of 'ordering'. "6000 feet beyond man and time" registers Nietzsche's sense of the Surd (in Latin), the Alogos (in Greek), the unspeakable and immeasurable Nature (in English) of this new perspective, this new ordering principle -- a principle as inhuman, or rather ueberhuman, as that "great grave face of geometry" of which the Comte de Lautréamont sings in the first of his Songs of Maldoror. That this vision, and this perspective, comes in sickness (comes to those who are ill) attests both to the mal (in French) and horror (in English) that is part and parcel of such experience (such "Maldoror" ). What is ill-seen and ill-said by man -- Maurice Bucke, Friedrich Nietzsche, et.al. -- nevertheless, for all its hallucinatory indistinctness, is the very signature and sensible register of the adamah (in Hebrew) underlying Adam, the chthonos (in Greek) underlying all creatures, the humus (in Latin) underlying the 'human, all too human'. Hence my slight disagreement with the first part yet ultimate agreement with the second part of your statement that "a mystical experience gives us very little to think about and is deeply suspect." Deeply suspect it is, and deeply troubling: hence its call (compulsion, propulsion) to (and for) thought. And it to thought it gives a veritable ocean, a frightful ocean ("ancient ocean: your form harmoniously spherical, which brings joy to the grave face of geomertry, reminds me all too much of the small orbs of man," sings Maldoror). Myesis (the "mystical") troubles the eye-witness and ear-witness, the eyes and the ears, by dint of its 6000-foot silence, its profound absurdity, its utter apagogy. "6000 feet beyond man and time" is indeed a mystical measure: and the measure (ordering principle) here is as important (imports as much to thought) as the mystical (ill-seen and ill-said). There is an undertone or bass-note straight out of Mr Lachman (former bass-player for Blondie) at work in these excellent posts -- a conjunction of the latter's correlations of Bucke, Bergson, Nietzsche (in his blog-like musings on The Secret History of Consciousness, or Maurice Bucke's turn-of-the-century treatise Cosmic Consciousness) and your gestures, beyond Nietzsche, to the problematics of Bergsonian intuitionism. That "little reality" which "bits of knowledge arrived at through intuitions" provide may well be, each one of them, an intermittent punctum (tying Bucke and Bergson now to Barthes) puncturing the studium of inherited, reified, fixed/fixated tradition, and allowing that something or nothing -- quidam, quodditas -- "6000 feet beyond man and time" to seep into thought, and in time (beyond time? "beyond man and time"?) readjust/reorder its bases ...

bviwes
09 November 2007 at 16:22

"We should not be on the lookout for unknown felicities or bestowals of grace; rather, we should make the effort to live in such a way that we wish to live this life again and like this for ‘eternity’. "

I wonder what advice Professor Pearson might be able to offer 23 year old Samina Malik, recently found guilty at the Old Bailey of being a committed Islamic exremist?

Dan
09 November 2007 at 16:24

In the Spring of 1872 in London Canada (formerly Kotequogong on the shores of the Askunessippi), a rather remarkable man by the name of Maurice Bucke suffered an experience not at all unlike that which Friedrich Nietzsche would undergo nine years afterward beside the lake of Silvaplana in the summer of 1881. And, like Nietzsche, Bucke took this experience as a call to thought -- indeed a call to re-evaluate himself and his values: a new 'cosmogony' of sorts, understanding the word 'cosmos' here in its original Pythagorean sense of a principle of 'ordering'. "6000 feet beyond man and time" registers Nietzsche's sense of the Surd (in Latin), the Alogos (in Greek), the unspeakable and immeasurable Nature (in English) of this new perspective, this new ordering principle -- a principle as inhuman, or rather ueberhuman, as that "great grave face of geometry" of which the Comte de Lautréamont sings in the first of his Songs of Maldoror. That this vision, and this perspective, comes in sickness (comes to those who are ill) attests both to the mal (in French) and horror (in English) that is part and parcel of such experience (such "Maldoror" ). What is ill-seen and ill-said by man -- Maurice Bucke, Friedrich Nietzsche, et.al. -- nevertheless, for all its hallucinatory indistinctness (indeed, it would seem, precisely *because* it is "ill-seen and ill-said" by man), is the very signature and sensible register of the adamah (in Hebrew) underlying Adam, the chthonos (in Greek) underlying all creatures, the humus (in Latin) underlying the 'human, all too human'. Hence my slight disagreement with the first part yet ultimate agreement with the second part of your statement that "a mystical experience gives us very little to think about and is deeply suspect." Deeply suspect it is, and deeply troubling: hence its call (compulsion, propulsion) to (and for) thought. And it to thought it gives a veritable ocean, a frightful ocean ("ancient ocean: your form harmoniously spherical, which brings joy to the grave face of geomertry, reminds me all too much of the small orbs of man," sings Maldoror). Myesis (the "mystical") troubles the eye-witness and ear-witness, the eyes and the ears, by dint of its 6000-foot silence, its profound absurdity, its utter apagogy. "6000 feet beyond man and time" is indeed a mystical measure: and the measure (ordering principle) here is as important (imports as much to thought) as the mystical (ill-seen and ill-said). There is an undertone or bass-note straight out of Mr Lachman (former bass-player for Blondie) at work in these excellent posts -- a conjunction of the latter's correlations of Bucke, Bergson, Nietzsche (in his blog-like musings on The Secret History of Consciousness, or Maurice Bucke's turn-of-the-century treatise Cosmic Consciousness) and your gestures, beyond Nietzsche, to the problematics of Bergsonian intuitionism. That "little reality" which "bits of knowledge arrived at through intuitions" provide may well be, each one of them, an intermittent punctum (tying Bucke and Bergson now to Barthes) puncturing the studium of inherited, reified, fixed/fixated tradition, and allowing that something or nothing -- quidam, quodditas -- "6000 feet beyond man and time" to seep into thought, and in time (beyond time? "beyond man and time"?) readjust/reorder its bases ...

mathesis.universalis
09 November 2007 at 16:31

Hi K.P!

I’m really glad that you have devoted an entire column to Nietzsche’s thought of the Eternal Return, not only because he himself called it the ‘central’ idea of his entire work, but also because it is almost impossible to understand the content of his “philosophy of the future” without understanding the function of the eternal return in the metamorphosis of the human into the over-human.

I the past two months, I’ve become addicted to watching Dr. Who (with David Tennant as ‘the Doctor’, of course!). I mention this because for me, both The Doctor and Herr Nietzsche share one insight in common: the Earth is sick and the only way to heal it is a new ‘temporalisation’ of flux (this is a term used by Barbara Stiegler that I like very much). It is not only our conception of time that is a root cause of our collective sickness, but also the distance between these conceptions and our experience of time. “Are there such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers yet? Must there not be such philosophers? (BGE 211). What the future needs, above all, is a doctor-philosopher: not a meta-physician, but exactly the type of wandering eccentric curmudgeon cum ‘ethno-temporalist’ such as ‘the Doctor’ (or even perhaps like the wandering eccentric bombast cum ‘ethno-botanist’ called Paracelsus).

Nietzsche’s struggle to theorize or even write about his experience at Sils Maria is the struggle to theorize the Eternal Return as a material ontology, that is to say, the almost impossible task of fitting into an abstraction a generative and hence timeless moment. The symbol of the Eternal Return may just as well be the symbol of Asclepius – the serpent coiled around a staff – as well as the symbol of the alchemical Ouroboros – the snake eating its own tail--because the Eternal Return is both the cure for the ailments of a diseased age, and also the poison (in German the word is ironically Gift) that must be introduced into the body of the organism. Pierre Klossowski, one of the great readers of Nietzsche, imagined that the thought of the Eternal Return must have come to Nietzsche in the form of a ‘revelation’, a ‘sudden unveiling’ in which pleasure and horror become indistinguishable. The function of the Eternal Return, indeed, is to ‘translate man back into nature’ and the coming of the ‘future’ depends on this “strange and insane” task (BGE 230).

The question of health and illness (sanity and insanity) cannot be separated from the experience at Sils Maria (because as history turned out, Nietzsche is getter sicker and he will have to return permanently to his mother’s house on Humboldtstrasse soon enough). In this sense, I would like to leave open the possibility of thinking of the Eternal Return as a ‘mystical experience’ or as a ‘hallucination’. For both Bataille and Klossowski (as well as for more contemporary readers like Al Lingis), the claim is not that the Eternal Return is a Nietzschean kind of mysticism (in which case, one must posit a ‘real’ vs. ‘apparent’ world), but rather to think of it as structured like a mystical state (one that operates on various levels of ‘consciousness’). If the function of the Eternal Return is to return the human to nature (in the sense of “reuniting” us with the earth and thus bringing us to a stage of collective ‘health’) then we must leave open the possibility that the Eternal Return is a process of metamorphosis in which the human organism is transformed at the affective material level (precisely as you say KP “the possibility of determining and ordering individual human beings and their affects differently”), and in so doing, also transmuting the pre-established structure of consciousness.

Finally, since this is a column on ‘faith’ and you are presenting us with Nietzsche, I’ll leave off with the base player of Blondie, Gary Lachman who, in 2003, published a very good book called A Secret History of Consciousness. The book begins with the story of Richard Maurice Bucke, a doctor and director of the asylum for the insane in London, Ontario (which is, oddly enough, where yours truly lives!). In Bucke’s book Cosmic Consciousness, he not only narrates the events in which he himself experienced an “initiation to the new and higher order of ideas” in the back seat of a cab, but argues that these moments will occur more and more often because they are part of the evolution of the human organism and its mental apparatus. Nietzsche says that we must go beyond man and the experience of Eternal Return is key to this process which is also a task. Surely, it is not so insane to also hypothesize that the ‘over-human’ will be accompanied by a new form of consciousness.

From mathesis.universalis

Juno
11 November 2007 at 22:48

I've been thinking about Nietzsche's critique of Buddhism. Back in the 1800's, I don't think there were as many translations or scholarly works about the philosophy, so I'm not sure where he gets his ideas about it (I could be wrong).

But there's a movement afoot in America called the "American Chan Buddhist Center" which espouses a "pragmatic" Buddhism, and believes that Buddhism as a philosophy and a practice has evolved - and needs to evolve to meet the needs of each age.

I don't necessarily see a conflict between contemporary Buddhist practice - in this new pragmatic sense - and Nietzsche's exhortations to "know thyself" in order to transcend oneself in preparation of the Overman - or Overhuman, if you like. This pragmatic Buddhism espouses a philosophy that enables the individual to see clearly one's acculturation. I think this is a practical method for seeing one's nature in order to overcome one's nature. I don't see contemporary Buddhism as a life-negating philosophy. It may have been back in Siddhartha's day, but not in ours. I could be wrong, but I don't recall Nietzsche setting out a really "doable" practice or method for composing oneself in the mold of the Overman. Any thoughts?

Best,

Juno