A World of Gods and Monsters — Part Four
‘But when I seeing him in his oneship fetch along within hail that tourrible tall with his nitshnykopfgoknob and attempting like a brandylogged rudeman cathargic, lugging up and laiding down his livepelts so cruschinly like Mebbuck at Messar and expousing his old skinful self tailtottom by manurevring in open ordure to renew-murature with the cowruadsin their airish pleasantry I thanked he was recovering breadth from some herdsquatters beyond the carcasses and I couldn’t erver nerver to tell a liard story not of I knew the prize if from lead or alimoney’.
- James Joyce, (1882–1941), ‘Finnegans Wake’
The setting is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker’s pub; a television is broadcasting the tale of how Buckley shot the Russian General, (television was invented in 1927); a tale that Joyce first heard from his father. Buckley an Irish soldier in the British army, is poised to shoot a Russian general during the Crimean War, (1853–1856). Joyce incorporates within this chapter many of the battles waged throughout human history; the Charge of the Light Brigade, (1854), Brian Boru the Irish King combatting the Danes, (1014), the Peloponnesian War, (431–404 BCE). Plus there are rather a lot of anal jokes; for instance, ‘rockbysuckerassousyoceanal sea’, that is, rockby = Rugby; sucker = socair (Gaelic), calm, steady; and soccer; and suck (oral sex); and ass, anal); perhaps a reflection of Sigmund Freud’s, (1856–1939), view of war as anal sadism; well, sadism is essentially and self-contradictorily characterised by two opposing extremes, its aim being to destroy the object, but also, through mastering it, to preserve it, and correspondingly, the anal sphincter does have a dual phasal function of evacuation and retention on the one hand, and control on the other.
But for Joyce the Crimean War serves as a symbol of all wars because it contains the word crime. Buckley, as I said, is poised to shoot a Russian general, a primary rule of the army, always shoot the highest officer of the enemy army; although when he observes the general in his imposing epaulettes and decorations, he cannot bring himself to shoot; but rousing himself to his sense of duty he raises his rifle once again; but then, just as he is about to fire, the general pulls down his pants to defecate. And such a sight of the enemy in a so helpless and human state of precariousness is too much for Buckley, and he again lowers his rifle. Whereupon, the general having finished his business and proceeding to wipe his bottom with a piece of grassy turf, Buckley loses all respect for him and shoots. The general wiping himself with a sod of turf might also have been read as an insult to the old sod of Ireland itself and therefore most certainly not to be suffered.
Given the theme of the episode as a whole, we find many allusions to Russian politics, culture and history; ‘nitshnykopfgoknob’ is Rimsky-Korsakov, the great Russian composer, whose first composition was an opera about the prototypical Russian patriarch, Ivan the Great, or rather, ‘Ivan the tourrible’ as he is here.
And of course, ‘nitshnykopfgoknob’ also alludes to Nietzsche, (1844–1900), giving me my cue to complete this quick run through of the second part of ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ begun in part three of this series. Buckley, telling his tale in Dublin pubs in his old age, apparently said that the sight of the general defecating made him look so human that he couldn’t shoot, but upon pulling his pants up he then was an enemy general again; here we have a symbol of the human predicament, the general is human with pants down and bottom protruding, whereas with his uniform on he is not human any more. Recall that Zarathustra, upon reaching a town, then teaches the people about the overman, that man has evolved from apes but that he is still apelike:
‘What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.
‘Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes.
Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I bid you become phantoms or plants?
Lo, I teach you the Superman!’
- Thus Spake Zarathustra
This is such a false start to his supposed dissemination of wisdom. We have not evolved from apes, we are apes, no matter how much we may decorate ourselves, with epaulettes or whatever else, and which does rather undermine the notion of a Superman or Overman; ape, any of a group of anthropoid primates characterized by long arms, a broad chest, and the absence of a tail; and that is us; well perhaps the broad chest doesn’t apply to everyone, but broad enough for taxonomic purposes.
In the first part of part two of ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ Nietzsche presents a largely negative doctrine, nausea etc.; in the second part of part two he presents his positive doctrine, though frequently interrupted by harsh criticisms; the contrast between the desires of the masses and those of the overman remind Zarathustra of the belief that all man are equal, but if men were born equal, there could be no overman; and those that have preached equality have told the people what they wanted to hear rather than the truth, and the truth can be discovered only by the free spirit that wills, and desires, and loves; and such a free spirit finds that not all things can be understood, and that some must be felt. The will to truth is just one aspect of the will to power, and such a will carries the free spirit beyond truth and falsity and beyond good and evil as well. The slave only thinks he can conquer his master by his servility; he has the will to power, but merely in its lower form:
‘Wherever I found a living thing, there found I Will to Power; and even in the will of the servant found I the will to be master.
That to the stronger the weaker shall serve — thereto persuadeth he his will who would be master over a still weaker one. That delight alone he is unwilling to forego.
And as the lesser surrendereth himself to the greater that he may have delight and power over the least of all, so doth even the greatest surrender himself, and staketh — life, for the sake of power.
It is the surrender of the greatest to run risk and danger, and play dice for death.
And where there is sacrifice and service and love-glances, there also is the will to be master. By by-ways doth the weaker then slink into the fortress, and into the heart of the mightier one-and there stealeth power.
And this secret spake Life herself unto me. ‘Behold’, said she, ‘I am that WHICH MUST EVER SURPASS ITSELF’’.
- Thus spake Zarathustra
The forerunner of the overman has the will to be master, the will to command, the will to conquer; and since he is incapable of positive action, the slave can do neither good nor evil. The master with his capacity for evil has a capability for good; and if the good requires positive action, so does the beautiful. Zarathustra asks: ‘Where is beauty?’ and answers: ‘Where I must will with all my will, where I want to love and perish that an image may not remain a mere image’. If one cannot find truth among those who tell the people what they want to hear, still less can one find it among the scholars, who have removed themselves from the possibility of action and who knit the socks (or hose) of the spirit, so to speak:
‘Clever are they — they have dexterous fingers: what doth MY simplicity pretend to beside their multiplicity! All threading and knitting and weaving do their fingers understand: thus do they make the hose of the spirit!
Good clockworks are they: only be careful to wind them up properly! Then do they indicate the hour without mistake, and make a modest noise thereby.
Like millstones do they work, and like pestles: throw only seed-corn unto them! — they know well how to grind corn small, and make white dust out of it.
They keep a sharp eye on one another, and do not trust each other the best. Ingenious in little artifices, they wait for those whose knowledge walketh on lame feet, — like spiders do they wait.
I saw them always prepare their poison with precaution; and always did they put glass gloves on their fingers in doing so.
They also know how to play with false dice; and so eagerly did I find them playing, that they perspired thereby.
We are alien to each other, and their virtues are even more repugnant to my taste than their falsehoods and false dice’.
- Thus Spake Zarathustra
Neither can one turn to the poets, Zarathustra continues, for they know so little they have to lie to fill the pages they write. They are the great myth-makers; they created God, whereas Zarathustra’s mission is to lead men away from myths toward an assertion of the will. Men who accept the myths are like actors who play the parts assigned to them but who can never be themselves:
‘This, however, do all poets believe: that whoever pricketh up his ears when lying in the grass or on lonely slopes, learneth something of the things that are betwixt heaven and earth.
And if there come unto them tender emotions, then do the poets always think that nature herself is in love with them:
And that she stealeth to their ear to whisper secrets into it, and amorous flatteries: of this do they plume and pride themselves, before all mortals!
Ah, there are so many things betwixt heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed!
And especially ABOVE the heavens: for all Gods are poet-symbolisations, poet-sophistications!
Verily, ever are we drawn aloft — that is, to the realm of the clouds: on these do we set our gaudy puppets, and then call them Gods and Supermen:-
Are not they light enough for those chairs! — all these Gods and Supermen?-
Ah, how I am weary of all the inadequate that is insisted on as actual! Ah, how I am weary of the poets!’
- Thus Spake Zarathustra
The man who exercises the will to power can do so only by being himself, Zarathustra instructs us; (I have sufficiently covered what I think about that proposition in the previous part).
Thus endeth part two of ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’, and in case you have been wondering why Nietzche/Zarathustra spoketh with a lithp I am working with an old translation; one that was written in the style of the King James version of the Bible on the grounds that in its original German ‘Also Sprach Zaathustra’ was written in pseudo-Martin Luther (1483–1546)-Biblical style.
I am not sure how much of Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, (1770–1881), Nietzsche had actually read, he refers to him very little, but Nietzsche’s association of the will to power with the human being’s drive to create values; his assertion that the creation of values expresses a desire for power, his formulation of the master and slave moralities, is clearly appropriated from Hegel’s account of the structural movement of thought between two fundamental basic types, designated masters and slaves, an appropriation that stresses the distinction between Nietzsche’s historical genealogical approach (concerned with the origins of morality) and Hegel’s dialectical approach (concerned with the logical development of morality). As Nietzsche wrote, in ‘Beyond Good and Evil’:
‘I insist upon it that people finally cease confounding philosophical workers, and in general scientific men, with philosophers — that precisely here one should strictly give ‘each his own’, and not give those far too much, these far too little. It may be necessary for the education of the real philosopher that he himself should have once stood upon all those steps upon which his servants, the scientific workers of philosophy, remain standing, and MUST remain standing he himself must perhaps have been critic, and dogmatist, and historian, and besides, poet, and collector, and traveller, and riddle-reader, and moralist, and seer, and ‘free spirit’, and almost everything, in order to traverse the whole range of human values and estimations, and that he may BE ABLE with a variety of eyes and consciences to look from a height to any distance, from a depth up to any height, from a nook into any expanse. But all these are only preliminary conditions for his task; this task itself demands something else — it requires him TO CREATE VALUES. The philosophical workers, after the excellent pattern of Kant and Hegel, have to fix and formalize some great existing body of valuations — that is to say, former DETERMINATIONS OF VALUE, creations of value, which have become prevalent, and are for a time called ‘truths’ — whether in the domain of the LOGICAL, the POLITICAL (moral), or the ARTISTIC. It is for these investigators to make whatever has happened and been esteemed hitherto, conspicuous, conceivable, intelligible, and manageable, to shorten everything long, even ‘time’ itself, and to SUBJUGATE the entire past: an immense and wonderful task, in the carrying out of which all refined pride, all tenacious will, can surely find satisfaction. THE REAL PHILOSOPHERS, HOWEVER, ARE COMMANDERS AND LAW-GIVERS; they say: ‘Thus SHALL it be!’ They determine first the Whither and the Why of mankind, and thereby set aside the previous labour of all philosophical workers, and all subjugators of the past — they grasp at the future with a creative hand, and whatever is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is CREATING, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is -WILL TO POWER. — Are there at present such philosophers? Have there ever been such philosophers? MUST there not be such philosophers some day?’
In the passage from ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra that I quoted above Zarathustra remarked: ‘It is the surrender of the greatest to run risk and danger, and play dice for death’; and this is clearly echoing Hegel’s account of two self-consciousnesses locked in a life and death struggle that I discussed in the previous part, where I demonstrated how Sartre had appropriated this dialectic and turned it into something that made no sense. I believe something similar to have happened with Nietzsche’s appropriation of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic from whence he derives his notion of master and slave moralities. I will not go so far as to say that Nietzsche’s take on the master/slave dialectic makes no sense; it makes enough sense for us to be able to determine what is wrong with it; whereas Sartre’s take on the life and death struggle between two self-consciousnesses is so stupid it is not even wrong. But it is clear enough that in Nietzsche’s characterisation of morality something has gone awry; moral philosophy is a tricky subject in any case, but surely the mark of the moral is its universalizability; if there is something that would be morally wrong for me to do, then it would be morally wrong for you to do it too. Act according to the maxim that you would wish all other rational people to follow, as if it were a universal law, said Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804).
And universalizability is something that is absent from the notion of master and slave moralities. According to Nietzsche, the truths of master and slave moralities are established independently by feelings of an increase in power (here I won’t go into what ‘power’ as in the ‘will to power’ even means); they are expressions of the human being’s will to power in qualitatively different conditions of health and well-being; the truths of master morality are a consequence of strength, joyful optimism and naiveté, while the truths of slave morality arise from impotency, pessimism, cunning, and what Nietzsche terms ressentiment, the creative reaction of a bad conscience shaping up as it turns against itself in hatred; the bitterness and spitefulness of slave morality is thereby directed outward in ressentiment and inward in bad conscience; and in addition, there are differing notions of good belonging to master and slave value systems. Master morality complements its notion of good with the designation bad as understood to be associated with the one who is inferior, weak, and craven; but for slave morality, on the other hand, the designation good in itself is the complement of evil, the primary understanding of value withinin this scheme, and associated with the one possessing superior strength. Thus, the good man in the unadulterated form of master morality will be the evil man, the man against whom ressentiment is directed, in the purest form of slave morality; indeed, according to Nietzsche, all contemporary value systems are constituted by compounding, in varying degrees, these two basic elements; and it is thus only through a genealogical inquiry into how such contemporary systems came into their current form that we can hope to unveil the qualitative strengths and weaknesses of any normative judgement whatsoever.
So now let us compare that with the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, wherein Hegel goes that much deeper into what is at stake here (and remember that for Hegel this is merely one stage in the progress of consciousness towards absolute knowing, a stage at which consciousness is functioning with only a limited conception of freedom); and in which it is the slave that comes out on top, whereas the master ends up being rather ineffective. There is a transition from desire to the life and death struggle (which I outlined in the previous part) and then to mastership and servitude; for it had become clear enough that there is something deeply unsatisfying about the life and death struggle as a means of achieving recognition in the eyes of the other; for the subject either has to succeed in killing the other, in which case there would then be no other subject to do the recognizing, or the first subject is killed, in which case, of course, that subject thereby loses all that selfhood:
‘This trial by death, however, does away with the truth which was supposed to issue from it, and so, too, with the certainty of self generally. For just as life is the natural setting of consciousness, independence without absolute negativity, so death is the natural negation of consciousness, negation without independence, which thus remains without the required significance of recognition’.
Once this happens to self-consciousness, it relinquishes its struggle to appear as a subject in the eyes of the other, and hence also relinquishes its struggle to go free, and thus becomes a slave; and as soon as one self-consciousness recognizes that ‘life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness’, and thus relinquishes the life and death struggle, it appears at first that the two self-consciousness can now achieve some kind of equilibrium, whereby the one that has relinquished the struggle is the slave and the other is the master. The master can now show himself to be a subject in the eyes of the slave, not by risking his life, but by exercising power over the slave’s body, the very thing the slave was not prepared to lose in the struggle; and at the same time, the master can overcome his alienation from the world not merely by trying to destroy it, which was the only option at the level of desire, but by setting the slave to work on it.
However, as Hegel demonstrates, this apparent stability is merely illusory; for although the master has shown himself to be a subject in the eyes of the other, it is not at all apparent how he can then look upon this other any differently from an object in so far as the slave, like any object at all, is simply an instrument of his will, thereby rendering it difficult for him to maintain whatever recognition might have been achieved. And so, although on the one hand ‘[h]ere . . . is present this moment of recognition, viz. that the [slave] consciousness sets aside its own being-for-self’, on the other hand because ‘what the slave does is really the action of the master . . . [t]he outcome is a recognition that is one-sided and unequal’. At the same time, and contrary to initial appearances, it is the slave that ‘will withdraw into itself and be transformed into a truly independent consciousness’.
This initial step arises through the experience of fear with which servitude of the slave began; the very transitoriness of life was brought home to the slave in a way that the master has not come to feel, so it is the master and not the slave who has the most immediate relationship to his natural existence; and similarly, through his labour for the master, the slave is compelled to set aside his own desires, and thereby discover himself no longer impelled by them; and most significantly of all, ‘through work . . . the slave becomes conscious of what he truly is’. This is so as a consequence of the slave producing things not for himself but for the master, whereby he is compelled not merely to consume things, but rather to labour upon them too, while leaving them in existence. And the slave thereby discovers that he can leave his mark on the world in a way that endures: ‘Through this rediscovery of himself by himself, the slave realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own’. Note, and this is important, all three of the elements of fear, of service, of labour upon the world, have all to be present together for such realization to occur, since otherwise each will be degraded; for instance, fear will remain ‘inward and mute’ unless the subject can find himself again through labour, while labour in the absence of the experience of fear will mean that once again it is rendered ‘an empty self-centred attitude’.
The slave therefore reaches a quite different conception of individuality from that assumed by the master, who is never able to go very much beyond desire; something Nietzsche overlooks in his characterisation of master and slave moralities. In particular, the slave no longer sees the world as something alien to it, and which must therefore be negated if it is to achieve ‘its unalloyed feeling of self’; on the contrary, through his work the slave labours for someone else’s satisfaction, and so learns respect for the independent existence of the objects around him, with which he finds he can work; and consciousness thereby comes to a new conception of itself as an individual in the world, by now treating that world as a place to which it is attuned, not merely because it has various skills and talents that make it master over some things, but because it possesses a ‘universal formative activity’ which endows it with ‘universal power’ over ‘the whole of objective being’.
Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
………
For Freedom’s battle once begun,
Bequeath’d by bleeding sire to son,
Though baffled oft is ever won.
- Lord Byron, (1788–1824)
………..
Weary of the poets indeed!
………..
‘Oh! let me live my own, and die so too!
(To live and die is all I have to do:)
Maintain a poet’s dignity and ease,
And see what friends, and read what books I please’.
- Alexander Pope, (1688–1744).
To be continued ….
Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’ quotation:
1. oneship = the condition of being one or alone; and oneness; and Comyn: ‘The Youthful Exploits of Fionn’: ‘in his oneship’ (i.e. alone).
2. fetch = the apparition, double, or wraith of a living person; and a contrivance, dodge, stratagem.
3. within hail = within call, near enough to be hailed.
4. tourrible = tour (French), tower; and terrible day.
5. nitshnykopfgoknob = Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844–1900), German philosopher; and nichnyk (Ruthenian), night watchman (from Ruthenian nichnyi: night (adj.)); and nyzhnyk (Ruthenian), young man; and jack (in cards).
6. knob = (Slang), head; penis; and Kopf (German); head; and Nijni Novgorod, town, Russia (literally ‘Lower New Town’).
7. attempting = endeavouring, enterprising, venturous.
8. brandylogged = bandylegged, having legs curved laterally with the concavity inward; and waterlogged, soaked with water, in danger of sinking because of excess water onboard.
9. cathargic = cathartic, a purging medicine (stimulates evacuation of the bowels); and Roman Catholic.
10. lugging = lug, to move about, along, heavily and slowly; to pull along with violent effort; to drag, tug (something heavy).
11. laid = set down according to a plan (adj.); and let down, to lower.
12. pelt = a skin of an animal worn as a garment.
13. cruschinly = crushingly, in a crushing manner.
14. Messar = messa (Latin), things that are reaped, harvest; and mesar (Serbian), butcher; and Messer (German), knife; and Nebuchadnezzar.
15. expouse = espouse (obsolete), to marry; and exposing.
16. skinful = a full allowance; as much as one wants or cares for ; and sinful.
17. tailto = Tailte, Firbolg queen whose foster-son, Lug, founded the Tailtean games in her honor; and teetotum, game in which four-sided disk is spun; and bottom.
18. manureving = maneuvre, Mil. and Naval. The planned or regulated movement or evolution of troops or vessels of war; and manure, to enrich (land) with manure.
19. ordure = excrement, dung; and open air, the unconfined space outside buildings, exposed to the weather; and open order (infantry formation).
20. murature = muratura (Italian), masonry; and remuneration, the act of paying for goods or services or to recompense for losses (‘adequate remuneration for his work’).
21. ruad = (Irish), brown, cawraidd (Welsh), gigantic, and cowards.
22. pleasantry = an instance of pleasantness or enjoyment; a pleasurable circumstance; and Irish peasantry.
23. thanked = thinked.
24. herdsquatters = headquarters, the residence, permanent or temporary, of the commander-in-chief of an army.
25. carcasses = carcass, Mil. A spherical iron shell, filled with an inflammable composition, and having three holes through which the flame blazes; fired from a mortar or gun to set fire to buildings, wooden defences, etc.; and Caucasus.
26. erver nerver = have the nerve.
27. liard (French) = small coin; and liar; and lewd.
28. of = if.
29. alimoney = alimony, nourishment; supply of the means of living, maintenance; and for love or money.
