Returning

There is a strange displacement caused by the idea that you think you know something. You might have been close but you might have missed the phrasing altogether, and not really come close to the clarity you thought you had gathered. I put down Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche seven years ago during a long winter in which every idea you could think of was coming in my direction. I left it aside after being struck by recurring egotism and self-deception which I could identify but not express. It was a relapse into reverie and the calm assurance that amidst this sense of disruption and chaos there is order. But to go beyond the feeling and into a more wholesome expression of this understanding was not something I was willing to do back then. But at this time I am ready to continue this existential struggle, and picking up Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols/ The Anti-Christ I intend to react and decipher amidst his frustration the actual meaning of what he has written...

"Today, when we have started to move in the reverse direction, when we immoralists especially are trying with all our might to remove the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment from the world and to purge psychology, history, nature, the social institutions and sanctions of them, there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue to infect the innocence of becoming with 'punishment' and 'guilt' by means of the concept of the 'moral world-order'. Christinaity is a hangman's metaphysics...

That no one is any longer made accountable, that the kind of being manifested cannot be traced back to causa prima, that the world is a unity neither as sensorium nor as 'spirit', this alone is the great liberation- thus alone is the innocence of becoming restored... The concept 'God' hitherto been the greatest objection to existence... We deny God; in denying God, we deny accountability: only by doing that do we redeem the world.-"

-Nietzsche, F., "Twilight of the Idols/ The Anti-Christ", (Penguin Classics), p64-5

There is a certain destructive sense to what has been written. Destructive of structure and of assumption, that is. With the emphasis upon guilt and punishment there is a certain ability for structures of thought and faith to be cast over people, including Christianity. The religion itself is a formulation based upon teachings and scripture written in the distant past, and because of its close association with law and order, it becomes distant from the morality itself. If we forever hold ourselves accountable to the abstract and do not try to draw out associations with reality, then we can never have a subjective feeling or anything close to consensus.

It is hard to tell whether Nietzsche would be in agreement with what I say, but the difficulty is not in the fact that religion exists, but it is its nature and its limitations upon human consciousness. He is not precisely making an attack on religion itself, but rather on linearity and the formulation of an order which has no resemblance to the actual existence of those who follow it. To have morality which does not expand from the self or from the self-identification with the other is useless, and Nietzsche's attempt to liberate the reader from this legacy of the past and this homogenizing aspect of tradition is very typical of the philosopher. I stand in a kind of loose agreement, but I will have to see.

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