supplied no answers, no ethics addressed to the problems. Theirs was a radically different world, which we would not even recognize if we were transplanted in time.
The Burdens of the “Camel” Stage: The Question and Arrangement of the Inquiry
In Western cultures, two of the most famous cases of a radical rejection of the heteronomous religious life in which one was raised were Jesus of Nazareth and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Jesus was born into the tension between an absolutized political system of the Pax Romana and the absolutized deity of Judaism and its Torah. More than 1,900 years later, Nietzsche was born into the tension between a growing nationalism, which was being absolutized by Hegelian thought, and a Protestant form of Christianity, which itself was absolutized. Does it seem shocking to pair them up? It shouldn’t. It does so only because the Christian culture has passed down images or caricatures of each that pits them against each other as the starkest of opposites, mortal enemies, caricatures from lack of close reading or a misunderstanding of their skillful and disconcerting hyperbole.
It is no wonder if Nietzsche admired Jesus. But he had no use for Christianity, which had simply restored a slightly novel and eventually more absolutistic version of the very same inflexible idealism against which Jesus had stood. Few Christians have detected this irony; even fewer have acknowledged it. Thomas J. J. Altizer was one of those few, as his book, The Contemporary Jesus, shows. Altizer understood and accepted the apocalyptic nature of Jesus’ message and person.55 The early church’s reversal of Jesus’ own reversal of values will be no better understood than was Altizer’s discovery of the “death of God” through his familiarity with Nietzsche, which he announced in the 1960s. Why? Because the same religious heteronomy against which both Jesus and Nietzsche ranted prevails still today. It is not limited to fundamentalist sects of the Christian religion. It never has been. All religions thrive off authoritarianism and heteronomy. It is simply more obvious and extreme in the most fundamentalist branches in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and so forth.
Autonomy and realism are usually opposed by idealized social structures and rigid moral systems that help preserve the religious communities themselves. Only a handful of religious groups in history have ever espoused a conscious and consistent inclusivism or universalism, while the great majority have been exclusivistic. Very few Christian theologians have supported a consistent autonomy, which is almost a total novelty.56 It is as if most theologians just do not want to give up on the ideas contained in heteronomy; they simply slip categories to keep the personal God who has been so radically discredited in the past three centuries, and label it as “faithfulness” to God.
In his most important work, as he judged it, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche,57 in his hyperbolic imagery to encourage autonomy, enumerated “three metamorphoses of the [human] spirit”: it first becomes a camel, then a lion, and finally a child. Nietzsche was convinced that only through such metamorphoses is one able finally to realize oneself and think for oneself, to become autonomous and unashamed of one’s own ideas and willing, without which the fullest human life is unattainable (137–40). There is no “the way” possessed and fed to the masses by the few elite gurus; there is only “my way” for each person, which he or she must realize and articulate (307). Zarathustra, despite his life-mission of teaching others, realizes finally in the “Ass Festival” that he is not flattered but insulted to find his followers tending to worship or venerate his teachings (425–39). So he drives them off and resorts to a cave with his animals, though finally emerging from it to continue his work.
By “spirit,” Nietzsche meant the animating and intentionally constructive power of life, not simply Hegel’s “Reason,” much less his “Absolute Reason.” Walter Kaufmann noted that Nietzsche’s use of the German word “Geist” could be translated into English either as “spirit,” “mind,” “intellect,” “wit,” or, depending on the context, ultimately should also include esprit.58 Sometimes Nietzsche used it with an obvious religious meaning, yet at other times with an anti-religious meaning,59 and often it was simply neutral regarding religion. It was not reason deprived of “instinct,” thought separated from body or metabolism, “ressentiment” of not having courage to re-valuate one’s values, or some group effort. It is a lonely and threatening process.
That points to the central question of this book, which deals with only the first stage, that of the burdened “camel”: Can spiritual maturing and the maximum realization of human life occur through some religion’s Absolute metaphysics, at the expense of losing one’s autonomy? Would that not be a self-contradiction? If so, then does it not seem to require leaving behind authoritarianism, heteronomy, tyranny, anti-science, “ressentiment,” and other forms of giving complete deference to an Absolute Other defined in ancient times?
Nietzsche was convinced that to realize oneself demands rigorous autonomy. It requires continually “overcoming” oneself—that is, the subservient self, bad-conscience self, decadent self, idealized self, disproportionately shaped by others or out of touch with reality. As he saw it, one’s life force or “spirit” is a “will to power,” that is, an instinctual-rational urge or “passion” that seeks to “discharge its strength,” contending with decadence—with cultural or religious authoritarianism or heteronomy and anti-life ideals.
By “will to power” of one’s “spirit,” which means “discharging its strength,” Nietzsche understood “will” to indicate one’s natural instincts working with the empirically obvious world in a reasonable way—in contrast to any unnatural castration of instinct or inclination or focus on some nonempirically contrived “world.” In his exaggerated style, he even once claimed that the real cause of the quality and power of one’s life is more accurately one’s metabolism and natural passion or even the wildness or frenzy of Dionysus. For him, one could not separate the mind from the fleshly body—or the brain from its operations called “mind.” One’s diet as well as environment affect the mind as much as purely psychological causes or thoughts.60
Ironically, the “will to power,” however, necessitates what he called a “going under.” But “going under” did not mean deference to an Absolute, nor did it insinuate some diminution of one’s discharging one’s strength, much less becoming subservient to someone’s ethics of “improvement.” Instead, it involved a thorough critique of oneself and one’s ideas, as he described, a constant “overcoming of oneself,” equal in challenging one’s subjectivity to a shedding of the alleged objective values, which are the false security of authoritarianism and heteronomy’s imposed ideals. This “going under” then generates one’s own project of revaluating all values from which one then “goes over.”
The “will to power” demands an honest thinking for oneself. It flourishes from trusting one’s instinct and reason that does not engage in ignoring the actual life, which is empirically sensed. Much less does it call the actual and only world mere “appearance,” or hate anything that changes. To be autonomous means being open to continual process of change, questioning everything, of loving life as it is rather than resenting it or fearing it while hoping for something easier or more pleasant. It urges one to perfect the true, autonomous self through maximizing its power over itself, even in the reasonable and constructive sublimation of one’s desires.
It does not eliminate all ideals, values, or authorities, but avoids any values that are self-contradictory or not life-affirming. It devotes itself to examine all possible values, a “revaluation of values,” even if one must say “No” in a culture that says “Yes,” or one must say “Yes” to counter culture’s “No.” This means any ethics must be able to stand on its own merit within actual relations, not coerced by some heteronomous institution with its absolutized sacred texts and stagnant, unrealistic dogma. To engage in this revaluation of all values is neither easy nor popular nor comfortable, nor does it compromise its positions by insincerely agreeing with others. But it optimizes real life.
