Nietzschean hell

LISTEN. Looking forward to Happiness today, featuring Epicurus's repudiation of the gratuitously, injuriously frightening concept of eternal damnation. It's a hell of our own making.

The hound of hell, the Furies, the eclipse of day, Tartarus vomiting dreadful tides of heat from the pit--these nowhere exist... Rather it is the fear of punishment for our evil deeds in this life... the guilty mind, fearful for its deeds, applies the prick and flagellates itself... In short, the life of simpletons is made into a hell here and now.

The inhumanity of promoting the self-inflicted torments of the idea of hell gave Bertrand Russell one of the reasons why he was not a Christian (LISTEN). "I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to his preaching..."

Where the hell did this idea come from?

Our ancestors developed their ideas of Hell by drawing on the pains and the deprivations that they knew on earth. Those imaginings shaped our understanding of life before death, too. They still do. The afterlife is an old room in the house of the human imagination, and the ancients loved to offer the tour...
Belief in an old-fashioned, everlasting Hell hasn’t gone away. Just ask the pastor at most local churches, or the subway preacher with his brimstone-heavy pamphlets. But Hell has long been assailed as one of Christianity’s cruder means of maintaining control. And some spiritual leaders, emersonintent on presenting a less vengeful God, have attempted to soften or, in some cases, to abolish Hell—mostly to the anger and the anxiety of their co-religionists.
...we have afforded lavish attention to the specifics of punishment and left Heaven woefully undersketched...

Hell is so much easier to picture. The recent U.N. report on the climate forecasts, with devastating frankness, worldwide catastrophe, absent a sudden upsurge of yet undetectable stewardship and coöperation. Meanwhile, Drumpf’s E.P.A. has dismantled an expert panel on air pollution. This is, of course, a disaster...

You sow the coal and reap the whirlwind. Heat the air, and let the icebergs roll on righteously, like a mighty stream. First comes the flood, then comes the fire. It matters, very much, what you do. Vinson Cunningham, "How the Idea of Hell Has Shaped the Way We Think"

We think, many of us, that there will be hell to pay whatever we do. "All right then," says Huck Finn, I'll go to hell." Often than not, as Sartre said in No Exit, we're one another's torturers. Hell is other people.

Some say hell just means separation from god. That would put us all in The Bad Place, if the atheists are right. We'll just have to dress down and adapt, and enjoy ourselves as best we can.  Anyway, "if heaven ain't a lot like Dixie..." My version of that: if heaven doesn't have a World Series... (Go Nats!)

Some people, some students, think report day is hell. What would that make me?

Nietzsche's Zarathustra addresses the topic. "Now he's dragging me to Hell: are you trying to prevent him?' 'On my honour, friend,' answered Zarathustra, 'all you have spoken of does not exist: there is no Devil and no Hell. Your soul will be dead even before your body: therefore fear nothing any more!" And, "the tree that would grow to heaven must send its roots to hell." He may have got that from his hero Emerson, who spoke of living from the devil if that be the source of one's personal strength. But neither of them was speaking literally, they were both literary philosophers and not "analytic assholes" (see previous post, "At the Royce Conference"). Emerson was also probably the source of Nietzsche's "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger": RWE said in Compensation that "every evil to which we don't succumb to is a benefactor."

We'll have a report on Nietzsche today, whose "formula for our happiness" was
"a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.” Note, that's their happiness, not ours: they're the "Hyperboreans" who reject the resigned happiness of "weaklings" and embrace "the will to power." They're not democrats, or utilitarians, or probably even decent neighbors. They think we're complacent comfort-craving sluggards who'll be left in the dust of the philosophy of the future. "Man is a rope over an abyss." They think we're going down.

They also (to their credit) reject hell, as conceived by Christians who think humans must be cowed by threats of punishment in a punitive afterlife. But do they create a fresh hell, in imagining a world of convention-snubbing self-exalted uber-persons? Or a world of Dwaynes?

There are lots of Dwaynes and former Dwaynes out there, the latter having grown up and fallen out with the hero of their youthful disenchantment. Gary Kamiya was one:

I stumbled upon Friedrich Nietzsche when I was 17, following the usual trail of existential candies -- Camus, Sartre, Beckett -- that unsuspecting teenagers find in the woods. The effect was more like a drug than a philosophy. I was whirled upward -- or was it downward? -- into a one-man universe, a secret cult demanding that you put a gun to the head of your dearest habits and beliefs. That intoxicating whiff of half-conscious madness; that casually hair-raising evisceration of everything moral, responsible and parentally approved -- these waves overwhelmed my adolescent dinghy. And even more than by his ideas -- many of which I didn't understand at all, but some of which I perhaps grasped better then than I do now -- I was seduced by his prose. At the end of his sentences you could hear an electric crack, like the whip of a steel blade being tested in the air. He might have been the Devil, but he had better lines than God.

I was sold. Like those German soldiers in World War I who were found dead with copies of ''Thus Spake Zarathustra'' in their pockets, I hauled my tattered purple-covered copy of the Viking Portable Nietzsche with me everywhere... He was the closest thing I had to a church.

Eventually, I stopped going to church...The philosopher John Searle once told me that reading Nietzsche was like drinking cognac -- a sip was good, but you didn't want to drink the whole bottle. I'd been pounding Nietzsche by the case...

it was the monstrous doctrines at the heart of his thought -- the Overman, the Eternal Recurrence -- that had drawn me; they hypnotized me because I couldn't figure out whether they were coming from man or some frightening gospel. Now that I understood how much of Nietzsche's work was an attempt to turn his personal torment into something lasting, I realized that perhaps those enigmatic pronouncements were best seen not as antitruths handed down from on high, but as words he whispered to himself, beacons he lighted in the darkness to cheer himself up...

Yes, part of Nietzsche would always stand far above the tree line, and I would treasure that iciness. But I had to walk on the paths where I could go.
Still confused, I stood in the doorway. And then, as a gift, the following words came into my head, words spoken by Zarathustra to his disciples, disciples that Nietzsche himself never had. ''You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you. You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? . . . Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.''

I took a last look at the room. Then I walked out the door. 

A Nietzsche follower is an oxymoron.

A Nietzsche emulator is sadly anipathetic. "Poor Nietzsche's antipathy," William James called his stance of unremitting hostility to "herd" values, while acknowledging the importance of his questions but not the probity of his answers. "Shall the seen world or the unseen world be our chief sphere of adaptation? and must our means of adaptation in this seen world be aggressiveness or non-resistance?"

My main objection is to his anti-democratic contempt for most people, whom he considered incapable of "finding themselves..." He rejected the humane liberalism of Mill and the utilitarians who promoted the greatest happiness for the greatest number. I have no issue with any philosopher who renounces his own happiness (understood in conventional terms) in deference to personal challenge and "self-overcoming," but the eventual happiness (and reduction of present suffering) of the greatest number still seems a worthy social goal. Could there ever really be a SOCIETY of "supermen" (as opposed to a society that might tolerate the occasional Nietzsche)?

John Kaag was a Dwayne. He's not quite an ex-.

Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are is a tale of two philosophical journeys--one made by John Kaag as an introspective young man of nineteen, the other seventeen years later, in radically different circumstances: he is now a husband and father, and his wife and small child are in tow. Kaag sets off for the Swiss peaks above Sils Maria where Nietzsche wrote his landmark work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Both of Kaag's journeys are made in search of the wisdom at the core of Nietzsche's philosophy, yet they deliver him to radically different interpretations...

Different stages of life naturally invite different interpretations. Does Nietzsche have something important to say to all ages? Our reporters today span those stages of life. Can't wait to hear their answers.

Kaag, btw, is very good in this book on walking, and on happiness.

Nietzsche's eternal return...  When Nietzsche Wept (book)...film)