This is the second volume of Amin Ramin’s “Man in Islam”. The first volume can be purchased on Amazon at this link.
Nietzsche’s legacy is not coherent and consistent like Kant’s, but is made up of fragmented, confusing, and sometimes contradictory notes and aphorisms. Almost all of his books can be read in any order, starting from any place; this will not change anything in principle. Hence the difficulty in reconstructing his thought. There are many interpretations of Nietzsche which treat him so differently that one gets the impression that we are talking about different authors.
Anyone who begins to read Nietzsche is burned by the fiery, titanic energy emanating from his texts – a black fire blazing between the lines, like a kind of pulsation of Hell, an anti-heaven, pierced by blood lightning. And, scorched by this flame, he can no longer free himself completely – Nietzsche is stuck in the mind. And so he was right when he wrote of himself: “I am not a man, I am dynamite.”
And to this day, Nietzsche remains the last word in Western thought – in the sense that to this day there is no one who could surpass him or give him the same blow that he gave to Christianity. He has been subjected to innumerable interpretations, and perhaps there has not been a movement that has not tried to adapt him to its purposes, including Christianity and liberalism. But nothing has emerged that would crush Nietzsche, leave him behind, make him yesterday’s word in Western thinking. There was no Zeus to push Nietzsche’s titan from his philosophical throne. His anti-sun is still at its zenith. Nietzsche has bewitched the Western continent, and no one has even attempted to free himself from this spell.
From what does Nietzsche proceed, where is his starting point? He starts from such a thing as nihilism. The word “nihilism” comes from nihil, that is, “nothing.” Nietzsche states the coming of the age of nihilism for Western civilization and, by extension, for the world. “Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?” “The higher values have been devalued,” “God is dead,” the world is approaching the point of nothingness. Nihilism, “the uncanniest of all guests,” is already knocking at the door.
“The death of God” is Nietzsche’s paraphrase for the “death of Christianity.” That is, the Christian God is dead. Christianity as the 1,500-year-old ideological contour of the West is passing away – and Nietzsche poses the question: what to do? And he gives an answer that sounds like this: “revaluation of all values.”
If we present Nietzsche’s doctrine very briefly and very simplistically, we get roughly the following. The tragic, full of life world of antiquity, standing under the sign of Dionysus, was stabbed by the teachings of Socrates, Plato, and especially Christianity. Such a thing as morality emerged, designed to suppress the strong and noble in favor of the resentment of “slaves,” that is, all the humiliated, the inglorious, the wretched, the sick. Weakness, kindness, and sickness were declared positive values, while strength, cruelty, and the will to live were devalued as something bad. As a result, a centuries-long domination of unnatural values took place, which turned man into a herd-like, harmless, boring animal, the “last people.” But now “God is dead,” Christianity is a thing of the past, the age of nihilism is coming, and so the time has come to declare war on the old values. Dionysus returns, the world becomes the arena of the “will to power,” of the eternal return and of the Superhuman (Übermensch). Nietzsche states, “I have absorbed in myself the spirit of Europe – now I want to strike back.” This doctrine, he believes, is both “the most extreme form of nihilism,” for it denies everything that human civilization has hitherto rested on, and it overcomes it, approving “new tablets.”
He writes in Ecce homo, “I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite… But my truth is terrible; for so far one has called lies truth… It is my fate that I have to be the first decent human being; that I know myself to stand in opposition to the mendaciousness of millennia… I am a bringer of glad tidings like no one before me; I know tasks of such elevation that any notion of them has been lacking so far; only beginning with me are there hopes again. For all that, I am necessarily also the man of calamity. For when truth enters into a fight with the lies of millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of.”
Marx and Nietzsche are similar in that they both start from the same initial point – the statement of the death of Christianity, and the question: What to do now?
From there their thoughts diverge: Marx proposes the Luciferian project of a “proletarian revolution,” that is, of a collective Cain, Judas, or Satan in the logic of resurrected Gnosticism. We have said that the radical Gnostics gave the negative biblical characters a positive meaning. Since the world was created by the “evil demiurg” (identified with the biblical God), the characters opposed to him were in fact positive and even heroic figures who tried to escape from the prison of the absurd world. They were “revolutionaries” who challenged the evil of the universe and its creator.
Marx argued the same thing, only in a completely different guise, corresponding to the rhetoric of the 19th century. According to Marx, the world is dead matter, from which the new Gnostic subject in the form of the “proletariat” brings forth sparks of light through “labor” and “revolutionary practice.” In this way the “proletariat” turns out to be the collective Cain, Judas or Satan, confronting the “evil demiurge” in this new version of the old Gnostic myth.
And what does Nietzsche offer? He says that as soon as “God is dead” and that on which Western civilization has rested for at least a thousand and a half years shook and began to disintegrate, let us go further, arm ourselves with a hammer and destroy it all to the ground, and then perform the Dionysian dance on the rubble. This is the revaluation of all values.
First of all, this raises the question: if there is no God, what is there? And Nietzsche says: there is “will to power” and “eternal return.” The world is a plasmatic and completely senseless, irrational movement of some will, whose random structures appear to us as “truth,” “morality,” “reality,” and so on.
That is, according to Nietzsche, the world is foam on the surface of Chaos. Orderliness is only an illusion. The other side of existence is a mad dance of blind irrational forces. In Hindu mythology, Shiva dances. Nietzsche himself, as he fell into madness, danced naked in his room (this is how his landlady saw him, peeping through the keyhole).
In turn, the doctrine of the “eternal return” asserts that everything comes back again and again in the same way it was. As I sit and record this lecture now, so will I sit again millions and billions of times, to infinity. Everything will repeat itself in a circle. Nietzsche himself said that this strange doctrine came to him on the shores of Lake Silvaplan as a kind of “revelation,” and at first he expressed it in no other way than a half-whisper among his closest people.
The doctrine of the “eternal return” is not really an answer to the question of meaning, but the consolidation of nonsense. Nietzsche states the coming of the age of nihilism, i.e., the loss of all and any meaning. And the answer he gives to the question “what to do?” consists simply in fixing nonsense forever, as a kind of doctrinal foundation. Whoever endures such nonsense will become “superhuman.”
So we see that the essence of this doctrine is nothing other than the destruction of the human heikel and the immersion of man in a kind of schizogenic reality. Nietzsche’s world is literally a schizophrenic world in which there are no points of reference, no values, no moral criteria: a flowing river of chaos. This is how schizophrenics perceive reality. Their world is filled with impersonal mythical currents, a ruthless cosmic wind. We have already said that schizophrenia is not just a medical diagnosis: it is a much broader phenomenon related to the problem of values and power. It is hard to say whether Nietzsche believed in this myth because he was already going mad or, conversely, he went mad because he believed in this myth. In either case, Nietzsche’s madness was nothing more than bringing himself into line with his own philosophy.
A schizophrenic is, in a certain sense, a “superhuman.” We said that he is already a completely different being who has crossed the boundaries and limits of the “human.” This is the peculiar horror of schizophrenia, that a certain “other” is born before our eyes, with which it is impossible to find a common language. A schizophrenic person is united with a normal person only by an external physical shell, which, however, often undergoes strange transformations (for example, catatonic states). The schizophrenic is distinguished from the neurotic by this criterion. A neurotic is a human personality with certain mental problems. He, too, may see hallucinations, do strange things, but all within the same personality. It is possible to understand such a person, to help him somehow, even despite his inadequacy. In the case of schizophrenia, the personality itself disappears: there is no one to find a common language with; we see another being who is beyond “human, all too human,” as well as “beyond good and evil.” We cannot understand him, we are unable even to sympathize with him, and he, too, does not understand us or feel any emotion toward us. Ordinary people are somewhere on the extreme periphery of the schizophrenic’s world; in the end, they simply get in his way, like another biological species. Schizophrenics are usually abstracted from the society around them and pay no attention to normal people. If they do become interested in them, it is only within the framework of their own worldview. A schizophrenic can kill his father, mother or child and feel no remorse about it. In the world in which he lives, it appears as an iron “necessity” or an “order from a higher power.”
Nietzsche said that the people of the future would be those who could bear the weight of the doctrine of the eternal return. That’s like saying: the people of the future will be those who can bear the weight of schizophrenia. But the point is that the weight of it cannot be borne, because there is no one who will bear it anymore. There is no “I,” no subject, no personality. There is an empty shell, a black mirror through which glare, waves, and currents walk. If Nietzsche had returned from his schizophrenic voyage, we might have believed him and his promises. But he did not return from there.
And when we look at Nietzsche’s path, we see this strange thing: he himself as a person was the exact opposite of his ideals. He praised life and health while being weak and sick. He glorified the orgiasm of the flesh, having no relationship with women. He taught that the highest law is the right of the strong, but he himself was a harmless person, leading a secluded and quiet lifestyle. He preached immorality and “that which is falling should also be pushed” model, showing an example of conventional morality and burgher decency. No one trampled on the teachings of Nietzsche so crudely as Nietzsche himself.
When reading the memoirs of his contemporaries about him, one is amazed at how different a person they describe – as if “Zarathustra” and “Beyond good and evil” were written by someone else. There is a feeling that Nietzsche’s teaching was compiled by him not thanks to, but contrary to his own nature.
Another important point is that in Nietzsche’s personal myth a special role is given to the theme of suffering. His illness is a constant hero and companion of his books. Reading about it, especially in his autobiographical work “Ecce homo,” as well as in his letters, we notice the following strange thing: he does not try to overcome his sufferings, but rather cultivates them. Usually a sick person tries to cure himself of his illness. But Nietzsche made no such effort in earnest. He did not even have a definite diagnosis. And such a picture emerges that he needed the disease for his creativity. If there had not been this mysterious illness, there would not have been the phenomenon of Nietzsche itself.
Nietzsche’s illness defies all diagnosis, even the efforts of modern medicine. He complains of constant attacks of pain, vomiting, weakness, loss of vision, paralysis – and so for many years – but this does not resemble the clinical picture of any known disease. What does this have to do with? To the fact that in reality his illness was not so much a disease as a means of self-initiation. A “shamanistic illness,” if you will. In a sense, Nietzsche caused it himself. Without the shamanistic illness, there is no shaman – and without the illness, there would be no Nietzsche.
We have said that the path of pagan, contemplative initiation begins with the immersion of the self in a state of “nigredo,” a descent into Hell, extreme and severe suffering designed to shatter the habitual boundaries of the human form and tear down the borders and filters of the human heikel. It was believed that the individual could then pass into a new, superhuman state. The Danish traveler Knut Rasmussen spoke with a shaman in Alaska, and he told him how shamanic initiation takes place. Among the things he said was, “The only real wisdom lives far away from people, in complete solitude. It can only be obtained through suffering. Only solitude and privation open the soul to that which is hidden.” It is difficult to distinguish these words from some quote from Nietzsche’s writings. If inserted into any of his texts, the reader would not suspect a substitution; even the specific Nietzschean style is respected here.
If the solution to Nietzsche’s suffering, so carefully nurtured and cultivated by himself, should be sought somewhere, it is here. He tried to initiate himself – in spite of the resistance of his nature: he threw himself into the sea of madness, the “nigredo,” in order to raise a new man out of himself.
In none of what he did in his real life, does the slightest trace of his teachings appear. His behavior in everyday life was precisely that of a “human being,” and this is what arouses in us sympathy for him when we read his story. If Nietzsche had led a lifestyle consistent with his ideas – as his follower Crowley did – his personality would have been repugnant, which in turn would be reflected in the reception of his teachings. That is to say, in sympathizing with Nietzsche, people are actually sympathizing with something in him that is precisely at odds with his ideas.
Nietzsche’s biography is a story of how certain forces gradually took possession of him. At first he is a normal man, healthy and full of energy. Nietzsche’s teacher, the master of philology Ritschl, wrote of him as a 24-year-old, in one letter of recommendation: “He is now twenty-four years old: healthy, courageous, strong in body and spirit.” But by about the age of thirty, he is in a period of estrangement from people (“shamanic solitude”), strange physiological symptoms and the appearance of those books by which we know “Nietzscheanism.” He writes of himself at the age of thirty-six: “At thirty-six I have sunk to the lowest limit of my vitality.”
All syndromes here are similar to the signs of “shamanic initiation,” when a novice shaman separates from society, leads a lonely and strange life, experiences terrible suffering, and sees spirits… Nietzsche himself repeatedly hints that his texts are the result of non-human inspiration by certain forces. In his rough notes he makes this confession: “In my youth I met a dangerous god and did not want to tell anyone what then happened in my soul – both good and bad. So I gradually learned to be silent, as one learns to speak, in order to be able to keep silent about the important things.” Take a look at the famous passage from Ecce homo: “Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a clear idea of what poets of strong ages have called inspiration? If not, I will describe it. – If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one’s system, one could hardly reject altogether the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely a medium of overpowering forces. The concept of revelation – in the sense that suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down – that merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form – I never had any choice. A rapture whose tremendous tension occasionally discharges itself in a flood of tears – now the pace quickens involuntarily, now it becomes slow; one is altogether beside oneself, with the distinct consciousness of subtle shudders and of one’s skin creeping down to one’s toes… Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree but in a gale of feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity…”
So, Nietzsche’s story is the story of the gradual destruction of the human heikel by forces with which he came into contact, but which he himself feared. He then resisted them, then gladly went to meet them. And so as a human being he evokes undoubted sympathy for his suffering, but at the same time it should be remembered that the further the matter went, the more the human in him was washed away by the inhuman – until it completely destroyed him. “If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you,” he had this to say.
Thus, through Nietzsche, a huge flood of destructive forces rushed into human history. He kind of opened the door for them. These were the same forces that manifested themselves in the psycho-delusions of shamans and contemplators, in hallucinogenic gods and schizogenic myths. They ruled the ball at the dawn of history, and now, millennia later, there is a man who has attempted to rekindle the great fire of schizophrenia and break through to the pre-writing stage, where shamans and ecstatics bathed in seas of hallucinogenic experience.
Hence his contempt for reading and for written culture in general. The very style of his books tries to overcome the legacy of writing, to hack it from within. Nietzsche’s texts disintegrate into a myriad of fragments, now repeating the same thing, now rushing somewhere in a mad gallop of ecstasy: they can be read from any place, from beginning to end, as well as from end to beginning. In this regard, it is significant that his main work, “The Will to Power”, remained at the level of fragments collected after his death by his sister.
So the “revaluation of all values” is the destruction of the human heikel and the erection in its place of an inverted heikel of Satan. Note: in his critique of morality Nietzsche, with admirable tenacity, puts “power” and “strength” on the opposite scale from moral qualities. That which is strong is evil, unjust, cruel…. That which is weak is good, just, compassionate… In short, according to Nietzsche, “strong” is always amoral. Morality is the lot of the weak, the lowly, the unsuccessful. This doctrine is nothing but a complete perversion of all correct proportions.
Let’s look at the reality of the situation. All of us are created as Heikel of Tawhid. Humans are created on the shining fitra of truth, through the form of which the Creator made Himself known to them: “He who knows himself knows his Lord.” Such is the human form, which consists of boundaries and qualities, and its boundaries and qualities are power, strength, goodness, justice, beauty, forgiveness, knowledge, chastity, courage, honesty, and patience. And when humans were called to this human form through the Prophets and Imams, but rejected this call and forgot it, their form was replaced by the satanic one, which also consists of certain qualities, and these qualities are weakness, evil, cruelty, oppression, ugliness, ignorance, licentiousness, doubt, cowardice, lying and impatience. And this replacement is similar to how a beautiful person in a distorted mirror sees his face in the form of a dog’s muzzle. There are special mirrors that distort one’s reflection so much that one who looks into them sees himself as a dog.
So, by his acquired image man departs from this natural fitra on which he was created, so that he gradually begins to see the truth as a lie and a lie as the truth, just as in a distorted mirror he sees the face of a dog instead of his own image. Man was created “in the best form” (95:4), because he is the sifat (description) through which the Creator made Himself known. But by his deeds he casts himself into “the lowest of the low” (95: 5), just as in a distorted mirror man’s face looks like the face of a dog. The mirror here is our deeds, and the reflection is the form of man, turned in the opposite direction from fitra. And this is what the Quran is talking about, conveying the words of Iblis: “I will order them so they will distort the creation of Allah” (4: 199).
Therefore, all people without exception know the truth through their original form, on which they were created, but at the same time they reject it through their second distorted form, which they themselves have acquired. And for the same reason, as we have said, if personalities like Nietzsche have anything to attract others and generate sympathy, it is what is left of their original human fitra.
And so this “distortion of Allah’s creation” becomes the sum total of Western history as expressed in the teachings of figures like Nietzsche and Marx. These two opened the door through which the forces of chaos and destruction entered the human world.
And since the satanic sifats (qualities) represent the overturning of the human form sifats, they are the embodiment of weakness, not power. Their basis is nothing, whereas the basis of the sifates of man is strength and richness through the upholding of Him who is Strong and Rich. And so “strength” or “power” stands among the sifates of man, along with goodness, compassion, and beauty, while “weakness” stands among the sifates of Satan, along with evil, cruelty, and injustice: “Satan promises you poverty and orders you to immorality” (2: 268). “Promises you poverty” – that is, he calls for this overturning of your Heikel to build it on nothingness and existential poverty. And so, richness in the existential sense is also among the human sifats, as is strength or power.
From here we understand that in looking into the mirror of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Western civilization has seen a dog’s face – an inverted and distorted heikel instead of a form of goodness, strength and beauty. What he calls “Superhuman” (Übermensch) is a black double of the human form, born out of the fact of the “death of God” at the end of dualistic Christian civilization. If “God is dead,” then human is also dead. Nietzsche understands this and asks who should appear to replace dead God and dead human? And he says that it must be the Superhuman. In place of the hierarchy crowned by the human heikel, through which God gave him to know Himself, there must come a hierarchy of power crowned by other forces. But this power is actually stolen from among the sifates of the human form and placed where weakness should stand. This fundamental permutation is one of the foundations of Nietzschean philosophy, through which it continues to mislead Western humanity up to the present day.
In other words, the Nietzschean doctrine deals with the construction of a heikel, opposite to the human one, but here a very cunning permutation is made, which is difficult for the average reader to grasp: all the qualities of the black double are under the sign of “power” or “strength.” Whereas the quality of “strength” refers only to the human form, and the fundamental reason for this we explained above: the human heikel is primary, and the satanic heikel is secondary, resulting from its distortion. The satanic form is the reflection of the human one in the crooked black mirror of his deeds. And so the series of qualities Nietzsche glorifies as an alternative to morality and the old values – cruelty, injustice, the will to power – stand under the sign of fundamental weakness, not strength.
So Nietzsche takes the dark side of man and places it squarely at the center of the human being. The light of the original human form – his fitra and being – barely reaches this black mirror, like the glow of an extinguished star. The blackness of the mirror changes light into darkness. The resulting phantom, from which the energies of evil and violence irradiate, Nietzsche calls Übermensch, “Superhuman.”
It is possible to interpret this image in different ways, especially since Nietzsche’s own ambiguity provides a vast field of interpretation here. On the one hand, the Übermensch is a titan, a black creature standing above the abyss and incanting nothingness. The Christian God “died” to become a movement of elemental forces of power and progress, of science and technology. As human is no longer able to cope with their challenge, he must transform himself into another being, the Superhuman. This movement is conceptualized by Nietzsche as a heroic or, better to say, demonic challenge to all humanity.
Another interpretation of this image is that the Superhuman is a great magician, an operator who has mastered the World Tree – a figure that actualizes in himself this very “Über,” the proper “super”-human layers and levels. We have already said that the overcoming of man is the basic premise of the Pagan tradition. Man himself has no value; he should not exist at all: there should be something else in his place – the deity, the world nothingness, the beginning, the superhuman.
On the other hand, Nietzsche’s Superhuman is simply the antipode of the Christian saint. Nietzsche takes the Christian model of human as enveloped in original sin, hopelessly depraved, weak, guilty, humble, going against life – and endows it with opposite features: strong, violent, passionate, cruel, amoral, vital. It turns out the “Superhuman.” In other words, Nietzsche thinks in the same dual logic of Western civilization: “either-or.” It’s not by chance that he connected the figure of “Superhuman” with the image of the “Antichrist.”
And, in principle, all these interpretations can be combined in such a concept as Wille zur Macht – “the will to power.” The Superhuman is the bearer of the “will to power,” i.e., the same quality through which Iblis tempted mankind: “Shall I direct you to the Tree of eternity and enduring power?” (20: 120). And here we can say more precisely what the Nietzschean Übermensch was. The Übermensch is Satan’s Heikel, grown up on the ruins of the disintegrated human Heikel and stretched out its hands from the abyss of nothingness to the Tree of absolute Wilaya.
And in this respect, Nietzsche’s madness was a consequence of his inability to grow out of himself the “Superhuman,” to rise from the state of nigredo in which he had plunged himself. Nietzsche tried to destroy himself and reassemble in a new, “superhuman” structure. But the forces with which he had contracted along the way would not let him go: the black waters closed over his head. In the same way, the Nazi experiment to plunge Europe into “nigredo,” which would yield a “new world” and “new man” failed.
Nietzsche turned out to be a failed Dionysus. Nietzsche’s madness marked a dead end of European culture and a dead end of his own being. He came to nowhere. He set up an experiment and gave his own answer to it.
“God of madness” was Dionysus, a disciple of whom Nietzsche called himself. He is also the god of wine and ecstasy from the ancient Greek pantheon. The Greeks had the solar deity Apollo, who limits and gives form to things, and there was Dionysus, who, on the contrary, dissolves all forms in a kind of black madness, in a stream of metamorphoses. As we have said many times before, the pagan gods were jinn. “They worshipped Jinn” (34: 41), says the Quran. “There were persons among mankind who took shelter with persons among the Jinn, but they increased them in folly” (72: 6) And we have also mentioned that the Greeks were essentially psychonauts, floating through the expanses of the “Great Cosmos” in ships of hallucination. They actually stood very close to India; Greek culture is a distant relative of Indian one. Looking at India today, we can roughly imagine what the vanished ancient culture was like.
At the very least, the Greeks were much closer to India than to modern Western civilization, even though the latter considers itself their successor. Nietzsche himself was greatly mistaken in his assessments of antiquity. For example, he thought the concept of the eternal return was Hellenistic, when it was not at all. Because for the Greeks there is no restoration, no transition and return from cycle to cycle, from aeon to aeon. At the end of the cycle the Cosmos will inevitably and irreversibly burn up, and everything that was in it (including the gods) will also irreversibly and forever disappear and never be restored. Then a new Cosmos and a new aeon will be born out of the fire, but that will be, as they say, “a completely different story.”
Hence the pessimism of antiquity, which contrasts so sharply with Nietzschean optimism. In the true Hellenistic and pagan paradigm, bliss cannot come at the end of the cycle, and the Iron Age cannot be replaced by the Golden Age. The waters of Jordan never turn back. The cosmos inevitably fades, existence shrinks, the golden age is succeeded by the copper age and then by the iron age. The next state of the world is always worse than the previous one. In this perspective, “superhuman” cannot replace man. If anything will replace him, it will be the monkey or the “last man.” Therefore, what can be done here, based on this situation? The best way out is to silently and without much pomp dissolve into the faceless Absolute, from which everything comes – and this is what Plato and ancient philosophers in general suggested, unanimous here with the Indian Brahmans. Nietzsche does not want to notice all this, which is rather strange for a classical philologist.
And here we see that Nietzsche, like his older contemporary Marx, exploits the eschatological energies revealed by the Abrahamic paradigm. In the monotheistic picture of the world, being and history move toward some final, realization, higher state – in complete contrast to the pagan view, according to which the world can only degenerate, so that in the end the Cosmos will burn up, then a new cycle and a new Cosmos will be born, which will also burn up, and so on without end… In reality, the development of the universe goes from a lower stage to a higher one, because its rotation is not around itself, but around the Will of the Creator, for which there is no end and no limit. The taklif, which is the spirit of being, cannot be realized except through the arc of descent followed by the arc of ascent. And the day of the Great Gathering is a command and a bridge, stretching from eternity to eternity, over which we walk in this world, though we do not see it. As Imam Sadiq (A) said, “Knowledge is established, but they have forgotten this place. Yet they will remember it someday.” And this is the perfect “yes, we testify” answer to the question, “Am I not your Lord? And is Muhammad not your Prophet? And are Ali and the Imams from his offspring not your Imams?”
And hence such a fundamental thing as “eschatology” or “messianism” in the monotheistic paradigm. Judaism and Christianity – because they are built on a common basis with Islam – also have these points, and so Judaism says that the Messiah will come in the end, and Christians believe in the second coming of Christ, Judgment Day, and a future world. But these religions show only part of the picture, as if through a keyhole. We see the big picture in Islam, and only in the Quran and Hadith is there an explanation why this is so.
But let’s return to Dionysus, this Greek deity resurrected by Nietzsche. Sometimes he appears as a kind of creepy bull, a monster lodged somewhere in the abyss. Such things as wild orgies were associated with his cult. The women, called maenads or bacchantes, fell into a trance when they heard the call of Dionysus, raced through the meadows and mountains and with their bare hands ripped apart the animals they met along the way and sometimes even people. At that moment they had supernatural power in their hands: it was said that they could tear a herd of bulls to pieces. So, the cult of Dionysus was associated with the violation of all conceivable rules and prohibitions, with falling into a mad trance, in which human filters are removed. And it is interesting that the medieval “sabbaths of witches” are most likely nothing more than vestiges of the Dionysian cult. Probably, the origins of this cult go back to the practices of even older shamanism.
And so Nietzsche calls to this picture – to flee back to antiquity, to the Greeks. Escape in Dionysian orgiasticism from the technological world, which grew up on a rigid dualism – a world of prickly concepts, where everything is arranged into shelves. Hence his fierce hatred of Christianity – he understands that this dried-up, desolate reality of modernity grew out of it.
But with all this, one should understand the following thing: Nietzsche did not go beyond Christianity; he only drew the conclusions to which it had led Western civilization in its thousand and fifteen hundred years of domination. We have already said that the “God died” thesis is an entirely Christian one: God died on the cross; He became man and died.
And also in the Nietzschean “Superhuman” we can easily guess the Christian “God-man” – a man who became God. In the same way the “God-man” is discernible in the ideal of the “new man” of the builders of communism. There was also something “Nietzschean” in the practice of the leaders of Bolshevism, who turned Russia into hell for decades: they saw themselves as standing above morality, prohibitions, values and norms, like the cheerful and cruel Nietzschean beast. Ivan Bunin wrote, “That is their satanic power that they have managed to transcend all limits, all boundaries, to make every astonishment, every indignant cry naïve and foolish. And still the same frenzy of activity, still the same unquenchable energy that has not diminished for a minute for two years now. Yes, of course, it is something inhuman. It is not without reason that people have believed in the devil for thousands of years. The devil or something devilish is certainly there.”
Of course, we are not saying that these people deliberately borrowed something from Nietzsche: rather, it was the general “spirit of the age,” which each expressed in a similar way. The Christian “God-man” first became a “man-god” (a man who took the place of God) and then a “beast-man.”
Recall what the Quran says about the doctrine of “God-man”: “And they say, ‘The Most Merciful has taken [for Himself] a son.’ You have done an atrocious thing. The heavens almost rupture therefrom and the earth splits open and the mountains collapse in devastation that they attribute to the Most Merciful a son” (19: 88-91).
Isn’t the earth really split open?
And this is the moment that comes to mind, told by Overbeck, a friend of Nietzsche. When he received the mad letters from him, he suspected something was wrong and left urgently to visit him in Turin. Entering his friend’s room, he saw him in a visibly inadequate state: Nietzsche sang loudly, then danced and jumped. But suddenly, Overbeck recalls, he began – and I quote – “he began to say in an unimaginably muffled voice subtle, remarkably prescient and unspeakably terrifying things about himself as the successor of a dead God.”
Here we seem to catch a thin thread of everything that happened …
At the heart of this utopian movement, the self-twisting of Western civilization, is the plot of the implantation of God in man and history. There must come a state in which man becomes, in fact, God incarnate. The official doctrine of the medieval church offered a compromise understanding: the church is the “city of God” existing alongside the “city of the earth.” However, as radical Christian preaching spread, aided also by the invention of printing in the mid-15th century, people began to desire the incarnation of the God-man condition in reality. The conclusions from the doctrine of “God-man” were drawn – and like steam released under pressure, they spun a gigantic historical flywheel.
Characteristically, the first of the European revolutions of the New Age, the English one, was religious. It was led by radical Christian fanatics (“Puritans”) and inspired by the teachings of Calvin. The ideology of the Puritans was that an ideal society of the “pure” and “chosen ones,” the “kingdom of the saints,” should now be built. The God-man ideal should immediately descend into the darkness of the world and radically change it from darkness to light. These fanatics executed the king, but, as might be expected, the utopia bore no fruit: the royal regime was replaced by the far more brutal dictatorship of Cromwell, who carried out the genocide of the Irish.
A century later, this idea will become cramped within the framework of Christianity, and it will turn against it. The French Revolution, the second major revolutionary upheaval, was openly anti-Christian. The consequences of this revolution were even more devastating: economic collapse, famine, terror, the genocide of the population of Vendée, and then the world war and the dictatorship of Napoleon.
The third revolutionary wave is Marxism, which has already led to the worst destruction in all of human history. That is, we see that each subsequent revolutionary wave was more destructive than the previous one. Utopian nightmare was growing.
In fact, Nietzscheanism was another such revolutionary ideology. But Nietzsche goes further – not a new society (as according to Marx) is to be built, but nothing less than a new humanity. “Human” as a species must die out, to be replaced by a new species called “Superhuman.” Like previous utopians, Nietzsche does not bother to describe the model of this bright future, getting away with general phrases and poetic metaphors. All utopians, starting with the Puritans, pointed to a future state as something “beautiful” and opposed to the present negative state. They said nothing else. And every time their fantasies were tried to be put into practice, it resulted in an even worse state of affairs than before.
All of these utopias, not excluding the Nietzschean one, come from the same matrix, the number one Western utopia: the utopia of an incarnated God.
The main difference in utopian thinking is the desire for transformation. Utopians are not satisfied with the existing state. They necessarily need to change something, radically transform society and human nature itself. We have already explained the origins of such an attitude. On the one hand, it is dualistic thinking, which regards the present state of the world as something “bad” and “evil.” On the other, it is the Christian implantation of God into man. If God is implanted into man, if the divine is “overturned” into the human, then this forms some kind of unrealizable ideal. The world is “evil,” the world is “bad” and “corrupt.” The world is a kind of black artificial space that must be transformed, tortured and changed. But the divine principle is abandoned in such a world, and it suffers and cannot be satisfied by the existing conditions. This is the suffering deity in a terrible reality. Consequently, a state must be reached in which the world must somehow be transformed so that it begins to conform to this divinity thrown into it.
A civilization built on such foundations has achieved incredible success, unleashing tremendous energy and power. It was simply destined to succeed in controlling and transforming this world. An evil and black world as the starting point of repulsion – and a divine being shining above this world as the ultimate goal of the movement: this model led to the construction of a civilization of historical apocalypse, constantly drawn forward by the spirit of utopia.
This spirit found partial fulfillment in the liberal model of the “welfare society” built in the second half of the 20th century. It is perhaps the only utopia that has received a real historical realization. Other utopian projects, whether Marxism or National Socialism (largely based on Nietzschean ideology), quickly exhausted themselves. And perhaps the success of the liberal model is due to the fact that it is not as detached from fitra as the others. It recognizes, at least in words, private property, the inviolability of the home and the individual, the rights and freedoms of people…
But its very success also conceals its downfall. For the construction of an artificial society based on a break with the natural fitra of man entails an inevitable reckoning. Modern Westerners, fascinated by the utopia of the welfare state, do not want to have children. Utopia conflicts with the natural conditions of reproduction and cultural preservation. And this entails a process of extinction, which in a number of decades may lead to the disappearance of this society from the face of the earth.
This is not to mention the destruction of the world by the technology of this civilization. In fact, the artificial civilization of today is dumping its problems on future generations. The price for the short-lived prosperity of the first world countries under the liberal technological utopia will be the misfortune of our descendants, who will find themselves in a ruined, poisoned nature, in the middle of a huge dump, with an exhausted supply of irreplaceable resources. They will also be hit by the gigantic debt bubble that drives the modern economy. Needless to say, political regimes under such conditions are also unlikely to be liberal and democratic. The state of modern society is like a morphinist’s fleeting pleasure, to be followed by inevitable withdrawal. It lives in the present at the expense of the future.
Let us look, for example, at how the modern financial system works. Throughout most of human history, precious metals – gold and silver – have been money. During the French Revolution, they were first replaced by paper banknotes. They could still be exchanged for gold. But in 1971, the pegging of money, that is, dollars, to gold was abandoned (we say “dollars” because there is actually only one currency in the world, the dollar, and all others, including the euro, are its derivatives). Money has turned into paper or an electronic stream of ones and zeros, unsecured by anything. If you were asked to sell your apartment or your car for a few pieces of cut paper, would you accept it? The answer is obvious. And yet this is exactly what is happening in today’s economy. Real goods are sold and bought not even for pieces of paper, but for electronic ones and zeros, that is, for some entirely virtual symbols. The only thing that makes each of us agree to such transactions is the certainty that tomorrow, for the same pieces of paper or numbers in our electronic account, we will be able to buy some other real goods. Now let us imagine that this certainty does not exist. Dollars are worth no more than the paper they are printed on, and electronic accounts are worth nothing at all. This is the collapse that the modern economy is headed for. When will this happen? This will happen when the critical mass of the owners of these electronic ones and zeros will demand to give them real benefits for them. And it turns out that there are no such benefits, that these ones and zeros are just ones and zeros and nothing more. And then the whole system collapses like a house of cards.
You can draw as much virtual money as you want. When you issue such money, you are actually borrowing it. Since 1944 dollars have been U.S. credit obligations guaranteed by gold. That is, each dollar was a debt obligation of the U.S. government to give you so much gold in case of this obligation. However, in 1971, after the crisis with France, when De Gaulle sent several barges loaded with dollars to the U.S., demanding to give gold for them, the U.S. simply refused to do so and withdrew from the so-called Bretton Woods agreements, which guaranteed the gold backing of its currencies. After that, the dollar went free floating, freeing itself of any ties to the real economy. If you can’t demand gold in exchange for pieces of paper, you can draw all the pieces of paper you want. Each one of these pieces of paper or zeros in electronic accounts is a debt obligation of America. That is, in fact, all the people and organizations in the world exchange virtual debts between themselves, paying with them for real goods and services.
And now this debt began to grow like a storm cloud. Today, the total debt bubble exceeds 200 trillion dollars, that is many times greater than the total product of the global economy. These debts will never be repaid. It is impossible to pay them off. And meanwhile, the whole model of operation of the modern economy is based on this debt. Gold has natural limits, and therefore you can not subsidize the economy indefinitely. With real gold money you can’t make unnecessary flights to Mars, invest in useless artificial intelligence, feed millions of idlers, breed transgender people and sexual perverts. Under a gold system, the economy is forced to focus on real things and the satisfaction of real needs. And then there is this chain: an economy focused on real needs brings the man as the breadwinner to the forefront – consequently, the natural patriarchal system is restored – consequently, the birth rate increases… Everything falls into place, a natural society emerges. Under an unsecured money system you can finance anything and as much as you want, you have the ability to breed an artificial society – but you are forcing future generations to pay for this orgy. Because the debt bubble will burst sooner or later. No one knows when or under what circumstances it will happen, but it’s bound to happen. Debt cannot accumulate indefinitely. There are people whose lifestyle consists of living in debt. In order to pay off previous debts, such a person takes on a new debt and does not work, but simply spends what he has borrowed. There can only be one end to it: bankruptcy. Such a person sacrifices his future for the present.
The main conclusion from all this is that human nature cannot be changed. It is necessary to realize such a fundamental truth, on the denial of which Western civilization has been built for 1700 years already (if we count from the adoption of Christianity by Constantine in 325). The truth is this: human nature is unchanging. Man’s position in creation cannot be changed. Man is not God. God cannot become man. There is no movement from man to deity or from deity to man – a movement on which Christianity founded its civilization. After all, the first person to try to radically change his position in the universe was Adam. We know what that led to. And we have seen how the magical civilizations of the past tried it. Finally, modern times, starting from secularized Christianity, tried to implement this within the framework of its utopias. All these projects went against human nature, and they all ended in failure.
And now, perhaps, Nietzsche’s revolutionary utopian project is still waiting to be realized. We have seen that each revolutionary wave has been more radical and destructive than the previous one. The Nietzschean project was partly attempted by Fascism and National Socialism, but only partly, because at that time there were no means and opportunities for this. After all, as we said, Nietzsche’s project is the most radical of all: it is no longer about transforming society and man, but about destroying the very species of “human” and building a new being called “superhuman” on its ruins. And perhaps, right now we are standing on the eve of the practical fulfillment of Nietzschean utopia – only it will go quite differently than he imagined. We are talking about experiments already underway to abolish gender identity, to breed new “transgender” people, to change human nature itself through genetic manipulation, implanting chips, adding elements of artificial intelligence to the brain… In other words, the creation of a “posthuman” world. It is clear that the realization of these crazy experiments will create an even greater nightmare, in addition to all the existing problems. But we have no doubt that this latest, absolutely pathological attempt to repudiate human nature, replacing it with a “superhuman” one, will be carried out. The Western historical apocalypse in an attempt to reach God and become “god-man” should reach its final point, the apogee of madness – as the singer of “superhumanity” reached it himself. Nietzschean utopia is still waiting to be realized. It is clear that Nietzsche would once again go mad from such an incarnation – but, as we have seen, no utopia has ever been realized in the way its founders would like it to be.
Thus we have seen that after the decline of Christianity a period of its secular-utopian revision began, when the figure of the God-man received secular and, in essence, anti-Christian content. This period of post-Christianity, which took several centuries, is characterized by the utopias into which the god-man subject of Christianity was reworked. Now this stage, too, is coming to an end.
Nietzsche, as we have seen, proclaimed the “death of God,” that is, the death of Christianity. However, this is not entirely true, and an important correction must be made to this thesis. In reality, Christianity has not “died” – it has been reborn into humanism and the technical civilization of the New Age. The “modern world” is Christianity in a different guise. Naturally, it no longer needs the original shell from which it came, and so rebels against historical Christianity with all its dogmas and clerical institutions. Christianity disappeared not accidentally and not through violent destruction “from without,” but through a transition to New Age “humanism” with all its consequences, up to the installation of technological domination over the world. In this regard, it is quite significant that Nietzsche came from a family of Christian priests – both paternal and maternal – and characterized himself this way: “The offspring of whole generations of Christian priests” (letter to Gast). In his childhood and youth he was a devout Christian, so that he was even called “the little pastor.”
In the end, Nietzsche went mad, trying to change his rank and position in the universe – from man to deity. He collapsed trying to enter the role of God. His madness is the delirium of the whole civilization, embodied in one particular man.
Before him, another German philosopher named Max Stirner had made the same attempt. His book “The Ego and Its Own” was published in 1844 (that is, the year Nietzsche was born), and many of its provisions are very reminiscent of Nietzscheanism – to the extent that some have even spoken of plagiarism (it has been discovered that Nietzsche read Stirner, although he never mentions him in his writings). In reality, of course, it was not plagiarism, but the very movement of Western culture, which gave rise to the attempt of some philosophers to deify themselves. “The Ego and Its Own” is one of the strangest and, one might say, most shocking books in history. Stirner there proves with the thoroughness of a German professor (and he was a respectable teacher of a women’s gymnasium) that there is nothing above the human self, that is, the Ego is the final instance, the ultimate truth and God. Stirner declares, “I am the Creator and the creation in one person.”
On this basis he denies all morality, good and evil, God and the devil, truth and falsehood. Law, duty, morality, truth, order, and law are but obsessions. “Apart from Me, for Me there is nothing”; “for Me there is nothing above Me.” Man’s supreme law is his own will. Everyone has the right to pursue his own interests and do what he wants unrestrictedly. The Ego has no duties. The world was created by Me, to give Me pleasure. The only relation of the Ego to the world is to use it for its own purposes. “In the destruction of peoples and mankind I will find My exaltation.”
Stirner thus preaches absolute and unlimited egoism. What Nietzsche calls “The Superhuman,” Stirner calls “The Ego.” In both cases we have before us a secularized version of the Christian “God-man.” As with Nietzsche, the will becomes the foundation here. The world is based on the will of the Ego, which is the final and ultimate criterion. Like the Superhuman, the Ego is “beyond good and evil.”
“The Ego and Its Own” begins and ends with this phrase: “Nothing is what I have built my work on.” And then Stirner writes, “I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.” The last words of the book are as follows: “I am owner of my might, and I am so when I know myself as unique. In the unique one the owner himself returns into his creative nothing, of which he is born. Every higher essence above me, be it God, be it man, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness, and pales only before the sun of this consciousness. If I concern myself for myself, the unique one, then my concern rests on its transitory, mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say: Nothing is what I have built my work on”.
The difference between Stirner and Nietzsche is that he was less eloquent and wrote in a dry academic style. To all appearances, after “The Ego and Its Own” he also went mad, but did it quietly and imperceptibly, without Nietzschean pathos: he left book writing, became poor and died in complete obscurity, forgotten and abandoned by everyone, including his own wife, who left him as a kind of monster. Interestingly, the cause of death of this man who had declared himself to be God was a trivial fly bite. His contemporaries considered him insane; Marx and Engels mocked him in their “German Ideology.” He was completely forgotten, and only the Nietzsche boom brought him out of oblivion again.
Now let’s see what we could respond to all of this. Stirner writes, “It is said of God, ‘You cannot be called by names.’ This is said of Me: no concept expresses Me, nothing that is presented as My essence exhausts Me; they are all just names.” And, in fact, this is true, but Stirner does not understand what he is talking about and does not see that the conclusions that follow from here are the opposite of those he arrives at. When the Most High created the creatures, He did so in order that they might know Him. And since it is impossible to know Him in His essence, He established for them to know Himself through a description of Himself. And since no creature can make a description of Himself, He created a description of Himself so that creatures could know Him by it. And since His action is perfect, it is necessary that this description also be perfect and closest to any creature, so that it may become an argument over them. For every creature there is nothing closer to it than itself. Therefore, the Almighty has described Himself to us through us and made us a sign of His knowledge. As the hadith says, “He who knows himself knows his Lord.” And as He said: “We will show them Our signs in the world and in themselves so that they know that this is the truth” (41: 53).
So, the Creator gave you to know Himself through you; He established His description in you and for you. And therefore man in his essence is a Heikel of Tawhid and a description of the Creator for him. The Prophet (S) says, “He who knows the most about himself knows the most about his Lord.” And so, when you turn to yourself, you find not “The Selfish One” or “The Ego” – you find your Lord. However, just as the light from the sun, reflected in different mirrors, becomes different depending on the properties of each of those mirrors – whether it is straight or crooked, dark or light – so the essence of man (Heikel of Tawhid), reflected in a crooked mirror of human deeds, becomes not a description of his Lord, but the face of a dog, as we already gave in the example above.
And whoever reflects on this and understands it will realize that the result of Western civilization, as expressed in the teachings of Stirner or Nietzsche, has been a distortion of the human form and a reversal of the human Heikel, so that instead of being the sign of the Creator it has become the sign of Iblis.
So, the Almighty has described Himself to you and has enveloped this description in the form of your acceptance of that description. The relationship between the two is as that of one who stands before the mirror and the reflection in the mirror, shaped by the form of the mirror itself. And so to accept man as an individual egoist (as Stirner does as an accomplished theory and countless people do as an unconscious practice) is like accepting the reflection in the mirror in isolation from the one who stands before the mirror, constituting the essence of that reflection – so that if he moves away from the mirror, there is no reflection at all.
And to say, “He who knows himself knows his Lord” is like saying, “He who knows the reflection of the lamp in the mirror knows the lamp itself,” although the reflection in its essence is not the lamp and has nothing in common with it, so if you touch it (this reflection), it will not burn you. The reflection of the lamp in this example is a description of the lamp, and therefore he who has known it has known the lamp itself. But if we imagine that the shape of the mirror becomes crooked and black, we will not be able to see in it the reflection of the lamp and therefore will not be able to know it. The lamp is the same, but the shape of the mirror superimposed on the reflection made that reflection non-existent, distorted beyond recognition. And in this sense Iblis says, “I will order them so they will distort the creation of Allah” (4: 199) – that is, they will distort their human form so that it will be impossible to see the lamp in it. And in the same sense, Stirner, Nietzsche, and the like argue that man is the quintessence of selfishness, the will to power, or anything else besides the sign of the Creator and His description.
And just as if a lamp reflected in a mirror were removed from this mirror, there would be no reflection at all and only the empty form of the mirror itself would remain, so the distortion of Allah’s creation and the human Heikel leads to madness, that is, the destruction of the human form, which we have already talked about and which both Stirner and Nietzsche eventually ended with. And in a broader sense: the movement of nihilism and deontologization that has led Western civilization to become a virtual society of masks and guises is the same movement of breaking with the fitra and the existential basis (the lamp in our example) – when only the outer forms of black crooked mirrors reflecting themselves remain. And so the madness of these philosophers was not accidental: it corresponded to the madness of Western civilization itself.
Whoever reflects on this example will understand the quintessence of what we have been talking about in this cycle, and there are many more such examples “in heaven and on earth”, “and for Allah is the highest example” (16: 60)
845 total views
