The Mad Oracle and the Death of God
In his book, The Gay Science, Nietszche presents a comprehensive synthesis of his assault on convention and those values that feed on it. Book Three of The Gay Science contains some of Nietzsche’s most provocative statements in regard to truth, knowledge, logic, religion and morality. In aphorism 125, Nietzsche presents a parable titled “the madman.”[1] In this parable a “madman” rushes into a marketplace crowded with people, many of whom we are told, are atheists. This madman, armed only with a loud voice and a lantern, claims to be seeking God and asks where he can be found. Hearing only jeers in response from the crowd of atheists, he proceeds with a rant about the death of God complete with apocalyptic imagery of the end of the world. After providing this knowledge to the crowd the Madman sees that they do not yet know of this event and surmises that he has come too early and leaves. This parable of the madman acts as a vehicle for Nietzsche to provide images and ideas that help translate some of his more abstract philosophies regarding nihilism, eternal recurrence and the will to power. This essay will attempt to interpret the various possible meanings to this parable and find correlations with other Nietzschean writings, particularly his essay on “How the ‘Real World’ Finally Became a Fable.”
With the introduction of the “madman” in his parable, Nietzsche immediately establishes that this individual a different sort of person than the others in his environment. The mere fact that Nietzsche refers to him as “the madman” sets up his peculiarity and this perception is directly underscored by his eccentric wielding of an ostensibly superfluous lamp “in the bright morning hours.” Nietzsche also feels compelled to draw a distinction between the Madman and the men of the marketplace via his irregular clamoring on the subject of God. These men of the marketplace – we are told – are atheists and mock the Madman, both because of his strange light-casting accessory as well as his outlandish quest to “seek God.” This Madman, despite his later claim that “God is dead,” does not appear to be an atheist like these men around him. He is something different. The atheists, while not believing in God, continue to behave as though they exist in a world that God dominates. Plainly stated: their denial of God acts also as an affirmation of God. Their belief in a non-God is still a belief in God since it behaves as a sacro-ideological framework with a negative central foundation. In other words, the sacred belief of the atheist is that there is no sacred. The Madman’s astonishing claim that “God is dead” does not appear to be reflective of atheism in the sense that Nietzsche would understand it, and neither does it appear to be a statement of divine mortality. Cast in the tradition of apocalyptic literature, this parable introduces various allegorical images and – like any good writing of this genre – provides the keys for decoding itself in the surrounding text. The Madman introduces the idea of God as “the Sun”: the central foundation of sacro-ideology in the Western philosophical tradition. The Madman equates, rather directly, the death of God with the loss of the Sun. In this respect, Nietzsche is claiming – through his mad oracle – that the central empowering convention of Western civilization, that convention which enables all other values and conventions in Western civilization to exist and thrive, has lost its hold and is decomposing. With this apparent paradigm shift, Nietzsche is communicating to his readers that the idea of God is not something to believe in – with affirmative or negative belief – but rather to be regarded with indifference and ultimate insignificance. In this sense the Madman claims that God is dead: his convention-affirming powers have been put to an end. Furthermore, because God has died, the Madman has also pronounced the impending death of the conventional world. This is why he brings a lantern with him into the marketplace: he expects that there should be no light in the world but what he brings with him.
It is, perhaps, most revealing that Nietzsche’s parable exists in a world where the Sun is still actually shining. The atheists did not know that God has been killed, neither by the virtue of the event itself or the effects it would undoubtedly have on the conventional world. They ridiculed the Madman in the beginning and, upon hearing his declarations, were silent and astonished. These images seem to be suggesting a number of possible meanings. Nietzsche might be admitting, when he says, “Gods, too, decompose” that while God may have already died, his being was not immediately extinguished but, like a physical body, is in the process of decomposing: his power diminishing littlebylittle over time. This image is consistent with Nietzsche saying that the Sun has been “unchained” rather than saying that it has been destroyed or “died.” The power that the idea of God has, a power to feed and sustain the conventional world, appears to be gradually receding over time. We’re not told how long it has been since “the event” of God’s death, but it would be logical to assume that it has not been very long since no one seems to have noticed a change in the natural lighting. The Madman makes one peculiar statement about the consequences of killing God when he refers to the loss of the Sun. He says that we unchained “this earth from its sun.”[2] What is interesting about this statement is the fact that he does not use an absolute article like “the” when describing his parable’s world and its Sun. Rather, Nietzsche is subtly reminding us with his rhetoric that the world as we know it is only one possibility of many possibilities, able to change and adapt itself to our will and wishes.[3]Not only is there the possibility of a world without the nomothetic convention of “God” but it is also, in Nietzsche’s understanding of our own world, a current reality. As with parabolic world of the Madman, this world must cease to be one that we are familiar or comfortable with inside of our expectations and needs insofar as they are reliant or founded on convention. It would be a world where the sea was drunk up, where the horizon was wiped up with a sponge. A world where the sun does not shine, indeed where there is no sun at all, a world that “plunges continually,” that strays in empty space through an “infinite nothing.” Moreover, the conscious use of “this” instead of “the” in the passage also suggests another important Nietzschean concept: there is no “the world,” that is to say there is no “true world.”
In light of this reality that the Madman enlightens his contemporaries to, he also asks, rhetorically, where this leaves the world. What path does it take from here now that it has no center of gravity, no foundation? It is here that the Madman acts, in a sense, as an oracle predicting the future of the world. His questions appear rhetorical, as though are more prognostication than interrogation. The Madman hints that the world will take a path of active nihilism as it moves “away from all suns.” In other words, he claims that all values will wither and die as the world hides itself from all foundational centers of convention. Nietzsche envisions a world where there is no moral center for these values as this active nihilism removes an absolute point of reference: “is there still any up or down?” But the specific use of the directions “up” and “down” cannot be ignored in their metaphysically connotations either: most famously in that of “heaven” and “hell.” Finally, the Madman also questions his own utility in this reality when he asks, perhaps not as rhetorically as the other inquiries may be, whether or not it is necessary “to light lanterns in the morning” as he has done. What is the Madman’s conclusion in response to this question? “I have come too early… my time is not yet.” He claims to be ahead of his time, out of place in a time when the “sun” still shines. While it is not entirely clear that Nietzsche is identifying himself, via allegory or supposition, as the Madman of this parable though it would not be an entirely illogical conclusion, and the alleged foresight of the Madman is very similar to Nietzsche’s own exposition of self-importance in “Why I Am a Destiny.”[4] Nietzsche calls this parabolic oracle a “madman” but it becomes apparent in the course of the aphorism that he only appears to be mad because he exists in a different reality than those in the marketplace and, presumably, the rest of the conventional world. He is a man of the future or, perhaps more accurately, an “alien” in the strictest definition of the word. By referring to this man as “mad” Nietzsche may be paying him a backhanded compliment while highlighting the peculiarity of this man in comparison to his contemporaries in the parable.
This parable, while unique in its vehicle of delivery, shares substantial commonality with many of Nietzsche’s other aphoristic writings, including “Why I Am a Destiny,” The Will to Power and “How the ‘Real World’ Finally Became a Fable: History of an error.” While Nietzsche’s “history” of the idea of the “real world,” as presented in “How the ‘Real World Finally Became a Fable,” is categorical, concise and notably devoid of prose, one could easily draw a parallel from this aphorism – especially stages five and six – with the parable of the madman.[5] Stage five appears to describe a return to the neo-Heraclitean dismissal of being as “an empty fiction” as applied to the “real world.”[6] This “real world,” as Nietzsche explains it in earlier stages, is predicated on the assumption of the metaphysical and this assumption – beginning with Plato and passing through various phases of European Christianity – terminates in stage five of Nietzsche’s history. This stage is represented via the morning of the marketplace in the parable. The stage, like the morning, is the beginning of nihilism: the refutation of the “convention” of God and the values that feed upon it. “The real world – we have done away with it: what world was left? [The] apparent one, perhaps?... But no! [With] the real world we have also done away with the apparent one!”[7] This is, in effect, the claim of the Madman. While it seems that Nietzsche’s parable is a world of stage five, his oracle has transcended even this stage into the final stage: the stage of complete nihilism. The values have been negated along with the foundational convention. The “real world” is decomposing along with God. The chain tying this earth to its sun has become undone. The “real world” and the “apparent one” are no longer. This Dionysian physis, now freed from its nomothetic limitations, is hurtling through the dark, empty and infinite expanse of space, away from all convention.
There are, of course, problems with this idea as presented by Nietzsche. The most notable problem is that Nietzsche is unable to give any idea of what this “stage-six world” looks like. After all of the values have been “transvalued,” after all convention has been removed, after this world-as-we-know-it is dead… what is left? Nietzsche tells us in The Will to Power that mankind, through nihilism, is not returning to a state he once had. Nihilism is not the path to paradise lost. Eden is not the destination for which the nihilist strives. The nihilist understands that he “cannot reach the sphere in which we have placed our values” and, thus, “we deny end goals: if existence had one it would have to have been reached.”[8] This is, to Nietzsche, the nature of “eternal recurrence” – an essential component in life-as-physis: the conventionless Dionysian existence.[9] Yet Nietzsche cannot explain what this “Life” looks like without convention. How should it operate? How would we know when we arrived there? Indeed, can we even arrive there if there are, in fact, no “end goals”? These are questions that Nietzsche does not adequately resolve in his parable or in his related writings. It should not, however, be said that this is entirely his fault. To vividly comprehend this Dionysian world he speaks of would require an unprecedented transcendence of thought and a reformulation of communication: linguistic and conceptual. The human mind seems to be, in its perceptive abilities, limited to those ideas and images that have an anchor in the observable. The communicative limitations of human imagination would seem to be the last hurdle in between Apollonian nomos and Dionysian physis.
No comments:
Post a Comment