Kieran Nehil
When One Became Two: Nietzsche's Rebirth through Zarathustra
Introduction
During the writing of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (TSZ), Fredrich Nietzsche (N) underwent a rapid psychological transformation that resulted in the change of both his identity and philosophy. These changes in belief can be seen through his highly refined meditated thoughts made inexorable through, though merely an image of his thoughts, his writing. N incessantly wrote and thought for the 10 years prior to his psychosis, 1879-1889 with the writing of TSZ occurring 1883-1885, providing ample documentation of the shift in his beliefs and attitudes toward life. In the following writing I will utilize Jungian psychoanalysis to unravel more about the psychology of this brilliant and influential man.
N was undoubtedly a genius, becoming the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at age 24, the youngest person ever appointed to the position to this day. At age 34 following teaching under his Professorship, N made the pivotal decision to take on an independent pursuit of Truth, isolating himself in a small cabin and fiercely writing: experiencing enlightenment through Self-discovery. In 1882, N was invited to accompany his friend Paul Rée and Paul’s companion Louise von Salomé in search of a commune for writers and intellectuals. N became fond of the bright, enchanting Salomé, compelling him to propose marriage to her twice. Unfortunately the romantic fondness was not reciprocated, with both of his proposals being rejected. In 1883, after departing from his 2 companions, N experienced psychological rebirth and wrote TSZ in what can only be described as a fever of religious mania. N finished the 4th and final part of TSZ in 1885, 2 years after the onset of what he described as his “yea-saying” period. Following his rebirth through Zarathustra, N continued his isolation, writing until his psychotic break in 1889. The remaining 11 years of N’s life were spent more-or-less catatonic, with only a few minor instances of incoherent speech and actions. The TSZ experience heavily influenced N’s ideas and mystic, religious writing style, and appears to be a key event in the progression of his mental illness.
N lived during a time when mystic religious ideas still ruled over Western culture. The West was transitioning from its dogmatic roots in Christian morals, as we are still transforming today, to the barren moral landscape of nihilism. During N’s time these religious ideas were just ceasing to lose their authority, where they had been used as weapons to justify the distribution of human power and authority, seen most clearly during the dark ages. Prior to the fall of religious supremacy, kings had a divine right to power, and after the fall of God meritocracy became the status quo. Perhaps the most impressive prediction N made was the diagnosis of the neurosis that would develop in Europe and lead to the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century: ideologies would emerge to fill the void of meaning left by the death of God; people would seek sudo-religious mediating ideologies and lose their individuality to collective beliefs. N’s mental illness is certainly an abnormal case, in 1889, the year of his breakdown, he was an aged, academically proven 44 year old, putting him outside the typical age range seen for the onset of schizophrenia (16-30). He had also accomplished far more than one would expect from someone suffering from neurosises, further showing the brilliance N must have possessed to have accomplished such deeds while being effectively crippled by his poor mental and physical health. N pathology all his own, just as all individuals and their experiences truthfully are, that should be further understood for the progression of psychology. Judging from the pathological nature of his writings, I theorize a primarily psychological, as opposed to physiological, explanation for N’s psychosis.
The reductionist discoveries that begot the industrial revolution brought with them unintended consequences to the transcendental foundations of human morality and to the stability of the collective unconscious of humanity. The need for God to stabilize human’s psyche has not left, God is a part of our evolution. Some form of God/Gods can be found throughout all of man’s history, so many generations that the life of the individual reading this would compare infinitesimally. In Greek times, the followers of Dionysus would praise their God by a ceremonial ritual: Sparagmos; the disciples would find an animal and in their religious ecstasy would rip the sacrifice limb from limb. In modern times, the disciples of science with their will for Truth have committed their own form of Sparagmos. We have torn the concept of God apart through logical reduction, a sacrifice to a false God: Truth.
Resentment of God, The Father
Fundamentally we must ask ourselves what motivated this man to push himself to such extremes. I believe N possessed a foundational, a priori, axiom that constituted N’s views toward existence, and egotistically failed to recognize the extent of his illness, and pathologically enhanced his psychotic flaws through his own doctrine. Why Atheism nowadays? ‘The father’ in God is thoroughly refuted; equally so ‘the judge,’ ‘the rewarder.’ Also his ‘free will": he does not hear—and even if he did, he would not know how to help. Beyond Good and Evil This meant for N the adoption of Existentialism as an ideology to act as a philosophical schema: resentment and dismissal of God and the metaphysics associated with this belief. A man may be convinced in all good faith that he has no religious ideas, but no one can fall so far away from humanity that he no longer has any dominating représentation collective. His very materialism, atheism, communism, socialism, liberalism, intellectualism, existentialism, or what not, testifies against his innocence. Somewhere or other, overtly or covertly, he is possessed by a supraordinate idea. Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious [1] The Existential position of the dogmatic dismissal of God I believe to be linked to a Father's complex; the Father is noted to represent the “spirit” that saves man from pure carnality and hedonism [2]. A Father complex typically arises from an unconscious “trauma” of unresolved feelings, sequentially resulting in the institution of a counterbalancing dogma of beliefs; ultimately, a neurosis associated with the Father, one of the symbols of consciousness [2], results in dismissal of the Mother, the unconscious; this inevitably leads to archetypal possession due to the agency of the unconscious archetypes; the result of this is remorse of Father and consciousness itself.
This pathological, dogmatic philosophy acted as a mediating externalized structure for N, to guide, inform, and simplify the inherently convoluted decisions of life, also offering a compensatory reward system for the activation of libido: to always climb to greater heights. But these morals and values were starkly different from the Judeo-Christian ideals that underlie Western culture. The “logical” ego-consciousness can use the polarizability of these ideologies which act as moralistic filters that binarize the decision making landscape to a dull horizon, as with or against the externalized ideology, as opposed which I consider the righteous value of one’s honest, mostly unconscious, personal morality, this I believe is occurring through the unconscious Self archetype, the sum total of one’s conscious and unconscious prerogatives [1]. I therefore hypothesize this as someone who NEEDS to abide by logic and science: a strict a priori belief of any kind must be at sucutenny for Truthfulness―fully conscious of the tautology enacted by suggesting that the only Truth is in the inability to capture Truth, perhaps of Untruth.
We live in a dynamic environment and can never be completely sure of the value of the roots of our logic, therefore the a priori beliefs we need to logically orientate ourselves in the world must always be privy to change to avoid being stuck in a local minimum of Truth, and produce the consequences of diverging from reality, this I consider to be a condition of life. The value of an a priori assumption can only be determined through its subsequent use and a posteriori evaluation; the evaluation of the agreement of the assumption with the underlying observations of the phenomena, but never complete agreement with the absolute Truth, nor escape from the a priori underlying one’s own judgment. When letting go of an old belief, when one must become what they could be, first must let go of what they are.
Existentialism or Father complex acted as an ideological that unconsciously motivated force behind N’s independent pursuit of HIS OWN TRUTH, a desire brought about by his need for independent meaning that was separate from what he thought to be the underlying the a priori assumptions of all religiō; the assumption N thought stood as the foundation of Western culture and morals: the collective assumption in the presence of an omnipresent moral judge and authority through God. The idea “All men are created equal under the eyes of God”, an idea that traces back to Christian roots, that no longer applies if there’s no God. Just as the quote below suggests about one possessed by the shadow archetype, N gleefully sought to remove the foundations of God in himself, and do to the flaggatory asceticism of his ideology also sought to pull fellow drowning men deeper into the depths of existential anxiety and toward the path of Existentialism; like a predatory egomaniac he attempts to drown fellow souls being swallowed by the unresolved tensions with the Father; he embraces the shadow of his personality, and wielded his intellect and resentment as weapons of destruction: I am not a man, I am dynamite [3]. His persona as the prophetic antichrist-like figure, as the breaker of all the chains of his culture, filled him with a divine ecstasy that gave a sense of godliness and flooded his mind with an ecclesiastic libido of meaning, this fueled his manic and intense writing style. Although this motivating ideological force appears to be constitutive of N’s thoughts, a definite change in philosophical and personality change can be seen following the TSZ events.
Lies to Untruth
The personality changes that can most easily be seen in N following TSZ are a strong egoistic inflation and a shift of Self from an adolescent, romantic critic to a prophetic, malevolent literary marionettist consciously embracing the ecstasy of shadow possession and beckoning others to embrace his pathology. As Jung said, A classic example of enlargement is Nietzsche’s encounter with Zarathustra, which made of the critic and aphorist a tragic poet and prophet Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious [1] The personality changes in N are somewhat easy to identify, namely his personal identification with Zarathustra, the prophet, while his philosophical changes are more subtle. An example of his shift in philosophical belief can be seen in his developments on nihilism, arguably the largest philosophical problem that captured his mind. Prior to his independent pursuits, N had already delved into the void of nihilistic discovery suggesting the illusion of Truth, Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means, strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept "leaf" is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions; and now it gives rise to the idea that in nature there might be something besides the leaves which would be "leaf"—some kind of original form after which all leaves have been woven, marked, copied, colored, curled, and painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy turned out to be a correct, reliable, and faithful image of the original form. We call a person "honest." Why did he act so honestly today? we ask. Our answer usually sounds like this: because of his honesty. Honesty! That is to say again: the leaf is the cause of the leaves. After all, we know nothing of an essence-like quality named "honesty"; we know only numerous individualized, and thus unequal actions, which we equate by omitting the unequal and by then calling them honest actions….
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense [4] For N at this time, he discovered that language was an omnipresent tautology, a mere image of True phenomena. What then was real, N did not have a proper answer for this at the time, he only delighted in the ecstasy from the epiphany that Truth did not exist. In a way, N’s dismissal of God also resulted in his dismissal of Truth, for the Christian saying “God is Truth” has chthonic roots not easily surmounted by mere denial. Complete truth of the very phenomena we believe we are thinking about forever beyond reach, this idea isolates one from reality. For when you hear the wind blow or see the leaves flutter what you are experiencing is unique; the exact phenomena cannot be described with descriptions, only photographed with crooked tools to bring the actual complexity of the reality to a lower dimensionality of description using verbal, conceptual images: language. N pathologically mediated his psyche through the pursuit of greater Truth, denying transcendental value which acted as the guiding principle of the psyche, the Father.
Many heavy things are there for the spirit, the strong load-bearing spirit in which reverence dwelleth: for the heavy and the heaviest longeth its strength.
What is heavy? so asketh the load-bearing spirit; then kneeleth it down like the camel, and wanteth to be well laden.
…
All these heaviest things the load-bearing spirit taketh upon itself: and like the camel, which, when laden, hasteneth into the wilderness, so hasteneth the spirit into its wilderness.
…
But in the loneliest wilderness happeneth the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becometh a lion; freedom will it capture, and lordship in its own wilderness.Its last Lord it here seeketh: hostile will it be to him, and to its last God; for victory will it struggle with the great dragon.
What is the great dragon which the spirit is no longer inclined to call Lord and God? “Thou-shalt,” is the great dragon called. But the spirit of the lion saith, “I will.”
“Thou-shalt,” lieth in its path, sparkling with gold—a scale-covered beast; and on every scale glittereth golden, “Thou shalt!”
The values of a thousand years glitter on those scales, and thus speaketh the mightiest of all dragons: “All the values of things—glitter on me.
All values have already been created, and all created values—do I represent. Verily, there shall be no ‘I will’ any more.” Thus speaketh the dragon. TSZ [5]
When words are thought of as inherently lies one wonders if prior conceptions themselves stray from the Truth due to improper equivalence that concepts themselves bring false footholds to the minds of those who use them. Language seems to underlie man’s ability to reason, then how can man know anything if even his thoughts are underlined with “lies”, not wholly real or Truthful conceptions? Directed thinking, such as trying to solve problems, appears to be attached to concepts and can only be done through equating what is unequal which necessitates an a priori assumption.
Truth an oiled snake forever slipping beyond one's grasp. By accepting Truth as an illusion that cannot be captured, we begin to understand the concept of Untruth. N’s metaphysical presupposition is a very different redefinition of Truth: Truth serves life; to dismiss something because it is false would be to utterly renounce one’s very existence.
This definition of Truth is admittedly paradoxical, to explain this deduction about Truth one must explain the idea in lies, then accept the conclusion about this nature of reality, despite not believing in the truthfulness of words. I feel this is exchanging one logical fallacy for another. For why should you believe anything I say if I’m lying, this amounts to asking you to follow along with my logic, despite claiming to not believe in logic.
Although nihilism is what the romantic, adolescent N believed to be the ultimate Truth, a shift in his position towards nihilism can be seen in his later writing: like the first perfect European Nihilist, who, however, has already outlived Nihilism in his own soul—who has out-grown, overcome, and dismissed it. The Will to Power[6] This statement brings an important question to mind: if Truth isn’t real, how can one overcome nihilism? If one denies all footholds to make sense of the world they are forcing their psyche to do inhuman things, an inhuman task needs an inhuman to overcome impossibilities: Hence cometh the Zarathustra’s Overman: who overcomes meaninglessness, overcomes belief, and most of all overcomes himself.
TSZ is the dawn of a new prophet, N, through the mouthpiece of his soul, Zarathustra.This is the significance of TSZ to N: an involuntary testament against an impossible task, accomplishing this spectacle by the disillusionment his Ego, by way of archetypical possession from the voice of meaning of N’s unconscious: Zarathustra. The path of the Superman (synonymous with the Overman or Übermench) was the dawn of a new symbolic religious order to N , with N’s Zarathustra as the divine prophet like Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, etc. of this new brand of Supermen; N an anchorite of no God or assumptions shepherding his flock of superfluous stars to the heights of ineffable pleasure beyond humanity. Except, as much as the paradoxical N disputed it, still held onto an a priori logical root that thwarted all ability to escape into the revitalizing waters of adaptation and rebirth, the unconscious. So far as we have any information about man, we know that he has always and everywhere been under the influence of dominating ideas. Any one who alleges that he is not can immediately be suspected of having exchanged a known form of belief for a variant which is less known both to himself and to others. Instead of theism he is a devotee of atheism, instead of Dionysus he favours the more modern Mithras, and instead of heaven he seeks paradise on earth. Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious [1] Prevailing ideas constituting the orientation of the individual in the world cannot be discarded, none escapes the biases of being human, except those who psychotically will to shed their humanity, and consequently their sanity.
Though the manic ecstasy of TSZ filled N with “yea-saying” energy period that lasted over 2 years [3], the greatness of N lies not in this ecstatic enlightenment, but in what N did after his “mania”: he reestablished his reason and elaborated on the discoveries he had made in a miraculously cogent sequel to TSZ: Beyond Good and Evil. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil. Beyond Good and Evil [7] This idea is an elaboration of the prior conceptualization N had regarding Truth, an overcoming of the prior philosophy’s absence of an ultimate, orientiating meaning. This new philosophy accepts Untruth as a condition for life, meaning to dismiss an opinion using the justification that it wrong because it is False would be viewed as completely in·congruous and would amount to rejecting the very essence of life itself; that the a priori judgements we make that are essential for life, we make knowing they are wrong. This was a development in an understanding of the world and a fundamental belief that resulted in the formation of a new identity for N. What Jung called a Dionysian enlightenment, I believe marks the onset of an ideological splitting of N’s mind, some manner of schizophrenia; obviously N had some genetic predisposition, with him becoming a recluse and appearing as an eccentric in public, but his line of thought must tell us something about the logical, ideological destruction of the human condition. A disharmony of the archetypes in the unconscious: schizo “split” - phrenia “mind”. For N, this meant the development and idolization of a singular unconscious archetype, the wise old man. The deification of a singular archetype caused disharmony in the psychic balance of archetypal energy in N’s unconscious; since the unconscious is the foundations of the human psyche its repression and disunification result in the unconscious enacting a counteraction to the conscious blockage by utilizing archetypal possession. After TSZ, N favored the ecstatic Truths Zarathustra would reveal to those the other parts of him would suggest; he felt “I” gave no choice, and rejoiced in his discovery of the eternal recurrence, which can be thought of as his discovery of the archetypal foundations of the unconscious, the predominating factor of consciousness; N’s Zarathustra the prophet of the archetypal recurrence.
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
Jung provides a magnificent description of the wise old man and his relation to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra:
He is the enlightener, the master and teacher, a psychopomp whose personification even Nietzsche, that breaker of tablets, could not escape —for he had called up his reincarnation in Zarathustra, the lofty spirit of an almost Homeric age, as the carrier and mouthpiece of his own “Dionysian” enlightenment and ecstasy. For him God was dead, but the driving daemon of wisdom became as it were his bodily double. He himself says:
Then one was changed to two
And Zarathustra passed me by.
Zarathustra is more for Nietzsche than a poetic figure; he is an involuntary confession, a testament. Nietzsche too had lost his way in the darknesses of a life that turned its back upon God and Christianity, and that is why there came to him the revealer and enlightener, the speaking fountainhead of his soul. Here is the source of the hieratic language of Zarathustra, for that is the style of this archetype. Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious [1]
The archetype of the wise old man is involuntarily manifested through a prophetic, shattering force that enlightens and reveals some great Truth to ego-consciousness. The megalomania, emphasis on mania, in N’s writing is a type of pathological thinking that I believe to be associated with this archetype: the ecstasy brought about by the wise old man’s revelations. I hypothesize that this archetype was manifested pathologically in N, who foolishly, or psychotically, embraced the archetype as his own identity. The manic accent of N’s writing speaks to the libidic surge of energy this archetype can produce upon revelation, clearly seen in the TSZ series. Ten days sufficed. Neither for the second, the first, nor the third part, have I required a day longer. Ecce Homo [3] This is a feat that could only have been possible with superhuman energy, even for a madman, assuming the honesty of N.
N thought the founder of monotheism, Zoroaster or Zarathustra, as a befitting symbol for this, as N called it, “type” of unconscious actor; the concept of unconscious patterns of behavior which possess some amount of autonomy in the psyche, eventually this idea being adapted by Jung as the arche-types, arche referencing to the “first principle” nature of archetypes and their responsibility in the formation of conscious thought. See how Zarathustra goes down from the mountain and speaks the kindest words to every one! See with what delicate fingers he touches his very adversaries, the priests, and how he suffers with them from themselves! Ecce Homo [3]
Here is a description of Zarathustra testament presented by N, an extreme manifestation of the archetype
Has any one at the end of the nineteenth century any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration?...If one had the smallest vestige of superstition left in one, it would hardly be possible completely to set aside the idea that one is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of an almighty power. The idea of revelation, in the sense that something which profoundly convulses and upsets one becomes suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and accuracy—describes the simple fact. One hears—one does not seek; one takes—one does not ask who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, it comes with necessity, without faltering—I have never had any choice in the matter. There is an ecstasy so great that the immense strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, during which one's steps now involuntarily rush and anon involuntarily lag….Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity...one loses all perception of what is imagery and metaphor; everything seems to present itself as the readiest, the truest, and simplest means of expression...This is my experience of inspiration. I do not doubt but that I should have to go back thousands of years before I could find another who could say to me: "It is mine also!" Ecce Homo [3]
Individuation
The Individuation process is a developmental process where one becomes conscious of unconscious contents; one becomes aware of something within themselves that has remained hidden from their consciousness; the Ego uncovers their unconscious. The Self is the archetype of orientation the imago dei, “God-image”, whose symbolic manifestation denotes a state of consciousness beyond dualities rendered by conscious logic, of True and False, of good and evil, of right and wrong, and in extreme unconscious “enlightenment” separate one from the knowledge of I: how the observer’s Ego relates to anything. On this hero’s journey through Individuation, this embarquement to a new Self, letting go of ego-consciousness appears to be mandatory; to be reborn, the hero must first die and enter the chthonic engulfing arms of the unconscious. The hero enters into the belly of the beast, the unconscious, but only does so when he has killed the Father, his guiding principle; after entering into the depths, the hero lights a fire inside the beast and frees a treasure from the belly of his unconscious; the hero is reborn and has regained a part of himself. When discovering a creature that has remained hidden beneath the sea of the unconscious, the individual experiences Individuation, and transitions to a new state of consciousness through the aid of an archetype [2]; the Ego does not know how to act when the guiding principle ruling over the former Self has been defeated; when one necessarily walks on untrodden ground the libido that arises must be channeled through an archetype to compensate for consciousness’s inability to adapt to the change [2].
As Jung said about rebirth, When a summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds and from the lesser the greater emerges, then, as Nietzsche says, ‘One becomes Two’, and the greater figure, which one always was but which remained invisible, appears to the lesser personality with the force of a revelation. Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious [1] This development on N’s acceptance of Untruth is the unfolding of an idea that had its roots deep in the foundations of N’s attitudes toward life; a new brand of metaphysics, one inclusive of the death of God, but that may yet have the strength to overcome God/Truth’s absence. Based on the details of N’s TSZ, Jung’s Individuation process seems a fitting culprit for N’s psychological transformation during and following the writing of TSZ. Also in line with the Individuation hypothesis is the reverence with which Jung speaks of the changes that can ensue from the Individuation process, and the dangers of psychosis associated when Individuation goes awry. What was pathological about N’s knowledge of the Individuation experience: he attributed the process to himself, rather than to something superordinate to his Ego, the Self. Instead of realizing that his experience of the God-Image was an experience common to all who intensely undergo psychic reorientation resulting in Ego dissolution, N mistakenly saw this experience of God as a product of his own efforts and was a sign of divinity, suffering megalomania believed he was God, rather than something of God.
Zarathustra sees a young shepherd struggling on the ground with a snake holding fast to the back of his throat. The sage, assuming that the snake must have crawled into the young man’s mouth while he lay sleeping, runs to his help and pulls at the loathsome reptile with all his might, but in vain. At last, in despair, Zarathustra appeals to the young man’s will. Knowing full well what a ghastly operation he is recommending, he nevertheless cries, “Bite! Bite! Its head off! Bite!” as the only possible solution of the difficulty. The young shepherd bites, and far away he spits the snake’s head, whereupon he rises, “No longer shepherd, no longer man—a transfigured being, a light-surrounded being, that LAUGHED! Never on earth laughed a man as he laughed!” TSZ [5]
Zarathustra in this stanza sees a shepherd choking on a snake. After unsuccessfully attempting to remove the snake he frantically shouts “Bite!”. As Jung analyzed [2], this story represents N dreaming of separating himself from the personification of his unconscious, the biting chthonic snake, the unknown, feared aspects of oneself. After the snake’s head is bitten off, the shepherd transforms into something inhuman and laughs like no man can laugh. N was the shepherd and had severed the primordial roots of his mind, his unconscious, and as a result drifted away from humanity altogether. N was reincarnated after separation from his unconscious and changed into the unhinged archetype of meaning, the mouthpiece of N’s soul: Zarathustra. I can think of no better way of describing the meaning behind this dream of N’s than through a dream of my own. When I was 16, I was struggling with a bout of major depression and had a dream that made a strong impression on me. I dreamt that I was sitting down in a room and I saw a humanoid shadow figure roughly my size standing across from me in the room. I leapt up and started running at the figure, going to attack, but right when I neared the figure, I woke up. At the time of the dream I felt righteous, for I was one who attempted to grab the Sun, to go against all the things that I found evil, even in myself, regardless of how the battle would end, because I knew I was fighting for Truth. With age, I have grown to possess a different view of the meaning of the dream. I was going through depression and self loathing and had already become deeply entrenched in an ideology: Existentialism. I was trying to kill the evil within myself, which ultimately amounted to trying to kill the evil part of myself; no one can escape their shadow indefinitely. After this dream my sleep significantly deteriorated and I stopped dreaming for around 2 years, my dreams slowly started to come back after the depression had lessened. I hypothesize that I damaged some kind of link to my unconscious which worsened my ability to slip in and out of consciousness through sleep. There has to be considerable contempt of oneself to try and attack one’s unconscious. I had tried to defeat the parts of myself that I didn’t like at the time; I’ve come to accept that one never defeats their tendencies, they only maintain their psyche and repair it from the build up of psychic entropy; one’s best bet is to recognize and integrate their tendencies to create a more harmonious psyche with less conflicting wills. Another important thing Jung had to say about this psychic conflict, Cases of this kind occur when the unconscious has been resisted for too long on principle, and a wedge violently driven between instinct and the conscious mind. Symbols of Transformation
For many, it is the unconscious elements of their personality that form their most defining features, because their individuality is lost by way of ignorant possession from the collective unconscious, and are led unconsciously by their instincts, rather than consciously integrating their instincts into the fabric of their identity, their Self-conceptualization. They prefer ignorance to consciousness; they lack insight about the spirit that takes the reins of their actions; if they refuse to acknowledge Truth, “if I don’t admit it, then it isn’t true”, they are regressing to infantilism, fantasising about irrealities. N went a different route, he overcame the battle against the a priori altogether, dismissing the existence an antithesis of Truth, thereby accepting Untruth as a fact of life. N uses a tautological argument that criticizes the unconscious a priori assumptions that reductionist conceptualizations of fundamentally system-based phenomena use for logical simplification; we use the word and conception ‘brain’ to represent an organ and its functions and relations to the rest of the body, but the brain only exists in the relationships it upholds with the body, and possesses no border of function to discern one organ from the other, the two concepts are incomprehensibly linked, for truly they describe something that is only one thing. Through this dismissal, N “logically” rejected the conceptions of an unchanging eternal soul, an Ego, and with the rejection of these ideas, naturally led to a dismissal of “free-will”. N rejected the conceptions of the psyche reliant on moralistic reasoning and the blind acceptance of free-will that is necessarily the cultural norm for law preserving societies, instead he suggested only the presence of a STRONG and WEAK will [5], rather than anything “free”.
During the manic enlightenment of TSZ N saw his solution to the death of God, and sought to write the beginning of a new polemic religious text replacing Christ, the Western symbol of moralistic perfection and human wholeness, with the SUPERMAN, a sort of amoralistic figure which if followed I believe would lead to a fragmented psyche, instituting the voice and libido of the prophet, the archetype of meaning, the wise old man, as the highest valued libidic source, rather than the all-too-necessary unifying God-image, the Self archetype. Jung heavily analyzed the psycho-symbolic significance of Christ and suggested he was a representation of the Self [8]. N grew to see himself as the bringer of all meaning, the brightest star that would shine his light into every soul, and quite literally played the part of the biblical antichrist, an anti-Christian critic of unrivaled : Lucifer, latin for “morning star” or “light-bringer”. He mistakenly associated his identity with the archetype of meaning, in Jungian terms the “wise old man”. Eventually N’s individuality was lost to his unconscious, though contrasting to the average archetypal possession, through naivety rather than ignorance, since it appears he rejoicing embraced Zarathustra, for him an ecstatic “involuntary confession” [6].
(Speaking of the Individuation Process) But if one wants to understand anything of it and assimilate it (unconscious content and experiences of the collective) into consciousness, then a certain amount of knowledge is needed... It depends on the correctness of this understanding whether the consequences turn out more pathologically or less. Psychic experiences, according to whether they are rightly or wrongly understood, have very different effects on a person's development...Experiences of this kind are not without their dangers for they are also among other things the matrix of the psychoses...The pathological element only reveals itself in the way the individual reacts to them (archetypal images). The characteristic feature of a pathological reaction is, above all, identification with the archetype. This produces a sort of inflation and possession by the emergent contents, so that they pour out in a torrent which no therapy can stop. Identification can, in favorable cases, sometimes pass off as a more or less harmless inflation. But in all cases identification with the unconscious brings a weakening of consciousness, and herein lies the danger. You do not “make” an identification, you do not “identify yourself”, but you experience your identity with the archetype in an unconscious way and so are possessed by it. Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
From Jung's analysis of N, we know that he was possessed by the archetype of the “wise old man”, or as it is also called the archetype of meaning. N’s transformation into Zarathustra, was oddly enough, a conscious one; he was aware of his identification with the prophet and chose to embrace it, unrighteously. Contempt for humanity, isolation, self-tyranny, flagellation, ecclesiastic hatred for God, all merely reactants awaiting a catalyst for psychotic metamorphosis; the catalyst ended up being an unlikely personal encounter with Salome.
The psychotically inclined, resentful critic was trying to defeat God, a metaphysical proposition, but he was not only doing this for him, that was not enough, he wished his fate on all those who could still utilize a notion such as God, and to ensnare as many devotees as the baited hooks of N’s plutonian writing could catch.
This purpose beyond oneself, a noble pilgrimage for life, TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE, a tautology of N’s choosing whose supposition denoted a new perspective of reality, one inclusive of Truth’s absence. Neglecting his and others’ human needs resulted in the disunification of unconscious processes through conscious repression. For N, I think he truly believed he was making the Truth; inflating his Ego, and losing sight of himself, eventually completely losing his identity to the wise old man.The greater personality, the unconscious realization, coming in the form of Zarathustra, and what he felt to be divine purpose; since, it is likely the unconscious archetypes with their deep, penetrating roots that truly form the oldest, most foundational parts of our personality: be it to our Ego’s dismay. The one standing closest behind the shadow is the anima, who is endowed with considerable powers of fascination and possession Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious,
The Anima
(Speaking of TSZ) The text, let it be well understood, as there is some misunderstanding abroad on this point, is not by me; it was the astounding inspiration of a young Russian lady, Miss Lou von Salome, with whom I was then on friendly terms. Ecce Homo By his own account, TSZ arose from the inspiration of a woman, Lou von Salome; considering the derogatory views provided about women in his text, this serious affection must have been an abnormality for N. Just as in Genesis, it was Eve, the feminine, who made man self-conscious, N’s Individuation began with the rejection by Salome of N’s proposals for marriage, a shattering defeat that would have no doubt left him wondering where he had gone wrong to be deemed unworthy.
The weakening of his Ego resulting from romantic rejection, eventually produced a revelation, an example of the Individuation process, a time when the greater figure manifests from the lower figure due to the Ego’s contemptibility of the current personality, an overcoming of the Father, the current “law” or morality of the individual. By diving into the infinite black well of potential, the great Leviathan of the unconscious, the consciousness of the hero ceases to be, but from the swelling rejuvenating water of the unconscious the hero rises again, but this time with the treasure hard to obtain, namely his rebirth and the renewal of the libido of his life.
The weight with which the Individuation of the anima had on N can be seen even in his coherent works, appearing in N’s cogent preface Beyond Good and Evil: SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman—what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women—that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? Beyond Good and Evil [7] What was Salome to N: a physical representation that reflected the enchantress to N, the anima archetype, the feminine counterpart of the masculine consciousness. Since the anima stands behind the shadow [1], she is a deeper, more obscured archetype that has a lasting impact on ego-consciousness for those who discover her within themselves. The inner woman of a man, the anima, tends to be harder to identify for most than the dark daemon, the shadow, the negative side of the wise old man. Ironically enough, anyone not pathological recognizes the evil they contain and could let loose, but few men recognize the feminine side of what they are, the feminine side of their personality. For N, perhaps because he was missing the correct knowledge of the experience, or because he was psychotically inclined, the discovery of his inner feminine unconscious resulted in a pathological rebirth for N. Through N’s discovery of his anima, he began the Individuation process, a process that in extreme cases can produce involuntary vision of the Mandala, the symbol of the Self archetype.
The dangers of encountering the Self lie in the possibility of inflation and/or identification with the archetypes that are uncovered during the encounter, the effects on the psyche lasting long after the conclusion of the Individuation realization. Why then does encountering the “God-image” come with such risk? One becomes conscious of, and experiences something that was once hidden within themselves, i.e. unconscious, and not fully realized or understood. This necessarily comes by way of some degree of archetypal possession. In extreme cases of orientation the observer the “I” goes away and the “others” step in. If intensely panicked or confused the mandala symbol is autonomously produced, stabilizing and reorienting the psyche with protective circles. If by chance the severity of the unconscious content is great and/or the individual has a proclivity to dissociation, they may dissociate from the overwhelming libido released from enlightenment. During dissociation there lies the possibility of confusing one’s identity with a gods, an immortal archetype that has been born anew in every generation of the human unconscious; and have been loved and venerated for as long as there has been higher consciousness and a need for psychic symbols of transformation that aid in the conversion of unconscious contents to conscious. Intense archetypical possession is characteristic of the psychotic: they confuse the external world of reality with the internal archetypal contents of their unconscious. If the new understanding of the Self manifested during this process is pathological, its effects on the individual's life will manifest pathologically; depending on the truthfulness of the underlying explanation of the Self, the effects on the person’s life will result better or worse; beliefs guide actions.
Noontide Vision: an encounter with the Self
—And Zarathustra ran and ran, but he found no one else, and was alone and ever found himself again; he enjoyed and quaffed his solitude, and thought of good things—for hours. About the hour of noontide, however, when the sun stood exactly over Zarathustra’s head, he passed an old, bent and gnarled tree, which was encircled round by the ardent love of a vine, and hidden from itself; from this there hung yellow grapes in abundance, confronting the wanderer. TSZ [5]
As Jung pointed out, N’s noontide vision was a spontaneous form of rebirth [1], what I believe to be a drastic form of Individuation. Prior to the noontide vision, Zarathusra (Nietzsche) is confronted by various characters, the leech, the magician, etc., and finally the shadow. I believe each character represented N’s categorization of the types of the unconscious, the archetypal actors roaming about the underworld of the collective unconscious, a pre-Jungian description of the archetypes and the collective unconscious. The noontide vision is prefaced by Zarathustra’s encounter with the Shadow, where after trying to flee from his Shadow from fear, Zarathustra confronts the figure looming behind him, and accepts the Shadow into himself, acknowledgement of the lower part of his personality his unconscious that is alienated from the Ego due to its unsightly appearance and conflict with the desires of the Ego. In the noontide, Zarathustra comes to a great tree with a luminous vine of golden leaves wrapping around the trunk of the tree. Upon seeing the tree, Zarathustra decides to take rest underneath.
Self-realization is what caused the noontide sun to arrive for Zarathustra. The tree, a well known symbol of the Self, is wrapped in a vine decorated with golden leaves, the color of divinity. The vine forms a golden circle, a mandala. The sun is directly overhead and the a priori factors of the unconscious have been fully integrated, a time of enlightenment, the encounter with the God-image, the totality of the psyche, the Self archetype: a golden mandala. Self-integration is what caused the noontide sun to arrive for Zarathustra. In speaking of the mandala, Jung described it as a primordial image, a symbol of the Self, that spontaneously appears during times of intense disorientation. Contact with the mandala is an unconscious, involuntary event that occurs when the supremacy of the Ego falls below the safe levels of control and the protective circle of orientation is needed for the psyche not to collapse into chaos; the protective wholeness of the mandala is evoked to compensate and re-orient the psyche back to stable consciousness [1].
O happiness! O happiness! Wilt thou perhaps sing, O my soul? Thou liest in the grass. But this is the secret, solemn hour, when no shepherd playeth his pipe.
Take care! Hot noontide sleepeth on the fields. Do not sing! Hush! The world is perfect. TSZ [5]
A time when no shepherd playeth his pipe, when the Ego no longer plays his toon in the psyche: the disintegration of ego-consciousness. A time when right and wrong are transvaluated, and so also the normative state of consciousness where the Ego does not make logical assessments of True or False.
There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites. This is the paternal principle, the Logos, which eternally struggles to extricate itself from the primal warmth and primal darkness of the maternal womb; in a word, from unconsciousness. Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious[1]
Logos or logic speaks to the ability for one to differentiate between opposites, an ability that appears to be missing during intense states of panic or confusion, in intense cases resulting in Ego disintegration, also known as psychic death, or Ego death. N himself speaks of a time when even your reason becomes loathsome and to be shed during that great noontide. What is the greatest thing ye can experience? It is the hour of great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becometh loathsome unto you, and so also your reason and virtue. TSZ If N shed his logic, he entered a world without opposites where only the One exists, the thing beyond worldly dualities. A state beyond balanced consciousness, where individuality is lost and the unconscious pours out into experience without the logical, conscious filter of the Ego. Is this the ecstacy or ex-stasis of the ancient believers?
Shadow Possession
A man who is possessed by his shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps. Whenever possible, he prefers to make an unfavourable impression on others. In the long run luck is always against him, because he is living below his own level and at best only attains what does not suit him. And if there is no doorstep for him to stumble over, he manufactures one for himself and then fondly believes he has done something useful. Archetype of the Collective Unconscious[1]
It is difficult to discern the level of unconscious possession that befell N from the shadow archetype. N had a paradoxical hyper-self-consciousness that, on the one hand, enabled his great discovery of the unconscious archetypes, evidenced during the prelude to the noontide vision, but on the other hand also lacked insight about his false beliefs of grandior. Take for instance, N’s criticism of Spinoza. How could N not see that he was so alike to the hermit he was thrashing, perhaps because he was letting the wise old man’s wisdom flood his mind and saw himself as Zarathustra and not Nietzsche. The power of the wise old man, as N has said, comes only through the unconscious delivery of “Truth”; The thought possesses you, you don’t possess the thought. Like threading a needle through one’s own life in some grander dream than a human could possibly imagine. The thoughts of Zarathustra are produced by undirected thinking or fantasy, not by directed thinking like language or conscious reasoning.
Through his inner knowledge of human psychology, N tried to hook a bounty of shadowy fish sleeping in the unconscious of men with even a hint of appetite for darker things...
My work for the years that followed was prescribed as distinctly as possible. Now that the yea-saying part of my life-task was accomplished (TSZ), there came the turn of the negative portion, both in word and deed: the transvaluation of all values that had existed hitherto, the great war,—the conjuring-up of the day when the fatal outcome of the struggle would be decided. Meanwhile, I had slowly to look about me for my peers, for those who, out of strength, would proffer me a helping hand in my work of destruction. From that time onward, all my writings are so much bait: maybe I understand as much about fishing as most people? If nothing was caught, it was not I who was at fault There were no fish to come and bite. Ecce Homo[3]
Take a poem by N where we see more of his unconscious:
THE BEACON
Here, where the island grew amid the seas,
A sacrificial rock high-towering,
Here under darkling heavens,
Zarathustra lights his mountain-fires,
A beacon for ships that have strayed,
A beacon for them that have an answer!...
These flames with grey-white belly,
In cold distances sparkle their desire,
Stretches its neck towards ever purer heights—
A snake upreared in impatience:
This signal I set up there before me.
This flame is mine own soul,
Insatiable for new distances,
Speeding upward, upward its silent heat.
Why flew Zarathustra from beasts and men?
Why fled he swift from all continents?
Six solitudes he knows already—
But even the sea was not lonely enough for him,
On the island he could climb, on the mount he
became flame,
At the seventh solitude
He casts a fishing-rod far o'er his head.
Storm-tossed seamen! Wreckage of ancient stars
Ye seas of the future! Uncompassed heavens!
At all lonely ones I now throw my fishing-rod.
Give answer to the flame's impatience,
Let me, the fisher on high mountains,
Catch my seventh, last solitude!——Ecce Homo[3]
Where the island grew above the sea, where after isolation and intense reflection on the constitutive forces underlying the psyche, a beacon of meaning emerged from the sea of N’s unconscious: Zarathustra. N saw Zarathustra as the awakening of his divine purpose. With Zarathustra, N sought to act as a guiding and tempting force for those other weary Truth seekers who had also lost the light of their soul, the libido of God. It is unclear whether N’s Zarathustra was resultant purely from genetics, or whether N’s conscious schema was pathological, and if followed by others would result with the same disharmonious “schizo-phrenic”, pathological psyche, I lean towards the latter as the dominant factor constituting N’s madness. The seventh solitude, the final note of the siren’s song, God’s final day of creation, N’s creative conclusion. N cast his line to those whose foundational orienting beliefs had been eroded by the putridification of religion; the rot of Western, and soon to be Eastern, symbols caused by the reductionist dismantling of “illogical” religious symbols, which in the more broadened perspective of Jungian psychology, are unconscious symbols of collective group experience, approximations of the internal representations of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, which when used with conscious “belief” act as symbols of transformation that channel the flow of repressed libido into another form through an archetype. The logical, scientific discoveries bringing with them a conscious, all-too-conscious, certainty of uncertainty: nihilism; here, the ignorant, logical consciousness cuts the person off from the psychological tools humans have always used to cope, and unite against the perpetual problem of self-consciousness: having worries to be conscious of; peace is having nothing to worry about. The long venerated symbols of the human spirit worked to channel and repair the psychic wounds that naturally accrue in the unconscious into externalized figures of internal unconscious archetypes, which by their definition lack a definite conscious form and quantifiable patterns of behavior. The conscious contemplation of the symbol works to transform the libidic blockages in the unconscious first by introverting and redirecting libido inward, then directs ego-consciousness to take an approximate representation of the forms of the archetypes, i.e. the deities being worshiped. By representing the archetypes, the Ego allows for archetypal compensation which is necessary for the transformation of blocked contents.
Even to those of the unforeseeable future, whose unconsciousnesses are yet to be born, N casts his line. Despite his grandiose contemptibility of weakness, this angler has a secret: he does not want to be alone in his suffering. He seeks to drag others into the void of meaninglessness to replace what he has lost, and validate the darkness that has overcome him.
In pity of N, ironically, as pity was something he left behind, consider the last few stanza of a poem written by N just prior to his psychic break. Notice his shadow, the wise old man, and his anima turning on him: his unconscious ripping him apart.
OF THE POVERTY OF THE RICHEST
(I’m ignoring the beginning few stanzas of the poem)
—Silence!
A truth passes over me
Like a cloud,—
With invisible lightnings it strikes me,
On broad, slow stairs,
Its happiness climbs to me:
Come, come, beloved truth!
—Silence!
'Tis my truth!
From timid eyes,
From velvet shudders,
Her glance meets mine,
Sweet and wicked, a maiden's glance.
She has guessed the reason of my happiness,
She has guessed me—ha! what is she thinking?
A purple dragon
Lurks in the abyss of her maiden's glance.
—Silence! My truth is speaking!—
"Woe to thee, Zarathustra!
Thou lookest like one
That hath swallowed gold:
They will slit up thy belly yet!
Thou art too rich,
Thou corrupter of many!
Thou makest too many jealous,
Too many poor....
Even on me thy light casts a shadow—
I feel chill: go away, thou rich one
Go away, Zarathustra, from the path of thy sun, Ecce Homo [3]
In the first stanza of the poem, N feels archetypal psychic energy, libido, through experiencing the wise old man’s lightning of Truth. It appears as a cloud initially, a background process, then strikes suddenly with a weighty dose of libido. Like an addict searching for their next fix, N sought greater and greater Truth from the wise old man and the weighty libido accompanied with revelation. ‘Tis my Truth, N’s realization of the enchantress's illusion spurring from the depths of his psyche. With velvet shudders, N feels surges of libido, then glances eyes with the Anima, the realization of the illusionary archetypal possession; beneath her gaze lies a purple dragon. A royal maiden of purple, the Anima, connected with the dragon, the Leviathan, the predatory side of the mother or unconscious, this later becomes chaos in N’s psyche. N eventually gets his fix, the blissful light of Zarathustra, but Zarathustra’s Truth no longer stokes a luminous star in the pits of where N’s soul used to lie, now Zarathustra’s light brings only chills from pathological involuntary misfiring. Zarathustra’s Truth came as cold, self-mutilating libido, no longer his fire of purpose and meaning. Truth does not care about the outcome of man, Truth cares only for Truth. A thing could be TRUE, although it were in the highest degree injurious and dangerous; indeed, the fundamental constitution of existence might be such that one succumbed by a full knowledge of it—so that the strength of a mind might be measured by the amount of ‘truth’ it could endure—or to speak more plainly, by the extent to which it REQUIRED truth attenuated, veiled, sweetened, damped, and falsified. Beyond Good and Evil [7]
Conclusion
If you always cut the branch on which you rest you fall forever; the man who wills to defeat an impossibility defeats himself. An even more implausible thing would be that this man also possessed an intellect that honestly makes one wonder if he literally wasn’t the smartest man alive, one of their own calibre, who could’t or would’t, save himself from himself. In the end, N’s inability to change, coupled with a Father complex and a resentment of God, led to him regressing into psychosis. If you are always coming short of your own morals, you will always punish yourself. One who believes they can overcome an impossibility believes this only if they confuse their Ego with that of a gods’, whose archetypal character exists beyond individual reality and mortality, whose lineage has experienced and overcome every life threatening problem that life has faced.
“DEAD ARE ALL THE GODS: NOW DO WE DESIRE THE SUPERMAN TO LIVE.”
—Let this be our final will at the great noontide!—
Thus spake Zarathustra.
Citations