Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky’s Super-Human

Abstract

In the present article will be highlighted the fact that there is both a common ground which Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche stepped on, as well as a major bifurcation of this ground, with these two great visionaries being separated from a conceptual point of view and taking different contemplative paths. We will emphasize that, while Nietzsche assumes the role of a full supporter of the earthly values, of the immanent dimension, while denying the possibility of the transcendence and trying to identify the absolute only in the image of the Super-human, who is a witness of the absurd return of the same entity, Dostoyevsky goes beyond the proclamation of the empire of Man-God, since he projects his contemplative thinking towards the future of the latter, the sole authority that can give the extent of the value and positivity of such a hypostasis

Keywords: Circularity of the worldwill to powerself-fulfilmentself-annihilation

Introduction

The nihilism , as an ontic attitude, is one of the paradigms frequently encountered in the evolutional

course of the human being. The man has often assumed the totality of a radical rejection that frequently

identifies with the furious gesture of rebellion and rejection of traditional social norms, as well as of

moral imperatives conferred by revelations or priestly postulations. However, nihilism began to be

conceptualized and monitored at the level of philosophical abstractions, along with the issuing in 1862,

in the field of Russian literature, of the novel written by Turgevev, “Fathers and Sons”. Resuming this

term and going more thoroughly into it, F.M. Dostoyevsky will open the field of a broad debate on

what essentially addresses the fatal slips of the acceptance of an absolute freedom for the human

destiny. If, through the radical act imposed by the nihilist approaches, the tradition may be rejected and

at least put between brackets, as deemed later on by phenomenology, which presented its own

reductive method, then, the religion as well, along with its whole axiomatic, may be suspended in the

sense of an affective and mental non-implication in its values. Therefore, the fact of rejecting the

revelation , as a decisive element for the dynamics of religion, means the idea of faith in God is refused.

Therefore, the man can walk, liberated from the terrible burden of the supposition of divine existence,

towards his own future, a plan in which he could achieve the perfection of his own structures,

becoming, for himself, the only god. The cancellation of all traditional values and the rising of a single

triumphant axiom, which postulates that everything is permitted in the name of human evolution

towards the state of the Super-human , generates, for Dostoyevsky, a number of dramatic problems that

can reveal terrific risks incurred by such an ontological, gnoseologic and ethical option.

Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky’s Super-Human

Assuming this sentence of relaunching the man towards a self surpassing, through the rejection of

traditional European values, especially Christian ones, as the primary theme of his philosophical

discourse, Friedrich Nietzsche will insist on the need for cancelling the past full of Judeo-Christian

imperatives and on the reformulation of the conceptual step towards future, on the bases of an ecstatic

postulation of the Super-human as the only virtual presence towards which man should strive. Such a

resurrectionary jump can be taken on after the announcement of God’s death , with the discovery of the

will of power , as a factor that prevails in relation to the love for the fellow human, and after revealing

the sole explanatory principle of the world, the eternal circularity of the world, which Nietzsche calls

metaphorically the eternal return of the same . Therefore, it was necessary, within the framework of

such a radical approach, to make a total criticism of the Judeo-Christian spiritual heritage, as well as

the postulation of a new hierarchy of values, in the middle of which the image of the Super-human

haloed by the energies generated by the cancellation of the feeling of compassion should prevail in

favour of the exuberance of unleashed pride and force. There is, therefore, a common path on which

Dostoevsky and Nietzsche walked, but also a major bifurcation where this path branches, the two great

visionaries being separated from a conceptual point of view, since they headed for different

contemplative directions.

To Nietzsche, the Christian religion, along with the Buddhist one, represent one of the most

profound nihilistic steps ever taken in human history. Practically, Nietzsche believes that the Christian

worldview rejects the primordial elements of life and essential realities that define its dynamics. These

factors, whose crucial importance is denied by the religious and mystical scenario of Christianity, can

be summed up by the concept of will of power . Such a concept, once postulated as a capital component

of a correct view on life and human destiny, generates other satellite-concepts such as the degree of

power, hierarchy of power, the great disparities between the strong and the weak. From Nietzsche’s

viewpoint, the tradition of European spirituality was centred on assuming these Judeo-Christian values,

which are spaced substantially by the merciless truth of life, that reduces the human evolution to an

evolutionary and selective process, in which the vigorous ones must despise and neglect the inferior

ones. Of course, the acceptance of such a perspective can only exclude the possibility of the Christian

revelation and transcendent reality, the Christian divine nature, manifested through epiphanies and

miracle, with these ones being catalogued by Nietzsche as metaphysical lies and simple fables added

by early Christians to authentic historical facts. The instinctual reality of life must be contrasted here

with any timeless and supra-spatial hierarchies, all that matters being the triumph of man in time and

space, his victory over his own limitations and the obsessive leap towards the final stage of his

progress, the paradigm of the Super-human . Nietzsche tells us that this is not a supposition or a

fascinating proposal, but, instead, it constitutes the ultimate and undeniable reality of life. This

authentic mundane hierarchy must be accepted and assumed by the new man, liberated from the

Christian superstition and rooted in another conceptual ground different from that of the Judeo-

Christian disparities, but also platonic ones, between good and bad, moral and amoral. Nietzsche, 1999,

p. 43) Nietzsche wants to place the human consciousness beyond good and bad , in a framework of

relentless action that despises and rejects the love for the fellow human, considering the feeling of

compassion as the most decadent vice of mankind. The theory of the reward or of the divine

damnation, the idea that there is a post-temporal Heaven or Hell represent visions which are

incompatible with the teaching on the Super-human, teaching brought by Prophet Zarathustra.

According to Nietzsche, such visions are not other than the fruit of the resentment of the weak ones,

represented by the early Christians, compared with the strong ones, symbolized by the Romanian

aristocracy. The return to the hardness of life and to the attitude of the old Romans is compulsory,

according to Nietzsche, since it is an absolute imperative to be fulfilled along with the renunciation to

Christianity and to the faith in the Christian God, renunciation which is evoked under the ecstatic

assumption God is dead !

From the perspective of such a radical reversal and reconsideration of all the steps necessary for the

assumption of the Western spiritual tradition, should be adopted the cult of the will to power as the sole

guiding and relevant factor for the dynamics and fundamental structures of life. (Nietzsche, 1993, p. 5)

Nothing that belongs to the terrestrial existence, the sole ontic dimension that can be invested with

credibility, in Nietzsche’s view, cannot be excluded from the processual character of the upward

evolution of life, phenomenon that inevitably separates the factors which bear the will to power from

the ones deprived of it. What remains undecided and presents the risks of a conceptual hazardous

opening is the mere unclear and unilateral non-defining of this will to power. What is such a concept as

a last resort, and, especially, towards what consequences may lead its postulating as a unique guiding

mark of life? What if behind such a triumphant proclamation, on behalf of which must be sacrificed the

human soul’s need to relate to transcendence, divinity and love, would be hiding a dangerous emptiness

that only cultivates the selfish excesses of the self? The poetic-symbolic typology of Nietzsche’s

discourse, discourse often modulated in the shades of ancient biblical prophets and poets, is coming

here just to help the enigma of the primordial and ultimate sense of the concept of will to power, but

also of the proposal of the variant presenting the Super-human as a final milestone in the human

evolution. (Papini, 1991, p. 4)

By rejecting the possibility of spiritual immortality and transcendent life, Nietzsche believes that the

Christian scenario of the existence beyond death is the most nihilistic of all the world’s religious

proposals. To believe in a dimension infinitely superior to the terrestrial one and to move the centre of

gravity of life beyond it, is tantamount, in Nietzsche’s opinion, to placing the essence of life in

nothingness. (Nietzsche, 1998, p. 63) In the view of the German thinker, the assumption, for nearly two

millennia, of this explanatory version of the world and human destiny, determined the corruption and

the syncope of human consciousness, with this one being seduced and narcotized by the idea of a better

and more just world lying in an absolute plan. The end of this nihilistic situation can only occur by

giving up the faith in the Judeo-Christian deity, by the final extinction of the Christian disease and by

opening an era of sublime human strength and will, concentrated and symbolized by the iconic image

of the Super-human. Thus, the man must fulfil himself under the ontic sign of here and now, since he is

subject to the imperatives of durable acts committed by excluding the love for the fellow human and by

cultivating the disdain for those considered weak and for self pride. The whole life is limited, therefore,

to the absurd movement in circle, to eternal returns of the same entity , which fully justifies the

sentence of living life to the fullest, without resentments or moral projections to a hierarchy of

transcendent values. The only value is the one that imposes itself, which is dictated by the will of the

powerful human who submits consciousnesses defined as poor, the ethics of compassion being here

seen as a sign of decadence and spiritual disease. With the assumption of this existential and cultural

attitude that only believes in the selective evolutionism, the Christian nihilism will be defeated and the

dawn of the Super-human will triumph, as announced ecstatically by the prophet of God’s death ,

namely Zarathustra. (Nietzsche, 1996, p. 364)

What can be seen beyond this triumphalist style of approach and exposure, is not a fully clear truth,

a fundamental reality of life that has already been clarified and demonstrated in its absolute validity.

On the contrary, if one has a closer look, it appears that behind the Nietzschean conceptual theory,

there are simple utopian presuppositions intertwined with subjective perspectives related more to

Nietzsche’s personal experiences than to a central point argued through correspondence with the

realities of human existence. In this context, the evilness of Christianity which the German thinker

indicates, proves to be the only harmful product and action, cumulated, for centuries, by the fake

Christianity, politically and socially engaged and totally distant from the original Christian vision.

Also, the falsity of traditional values seems to be here an idea that exaggerates the conceptual and

ideological deviations of a few lines of European culture, the main lines open by this one remaining

valid, from the perspective of the evolution of human consciousness, for any period of time. But what

is really worrying in the utopian Nietzschean scenario is represented by the vehemence of denying the

absolute value of the love for the fellow humans . The exclusion of the compassion and its replacement

with the feeling of the strong one, who must arrogantly dominate and command, due to his task

concerning his own destiny of conqueror , represents a sentence which was first taken up and then

interpreted and applied radically, thus eventually contributing to incalculable historical tragedies. Also,

the rejection of the Christian revelation, on the assumption that all the apostles participated in a

universal plot, being guided by feelings of revenge on the aristocrats of that time and on the verticality

of the Roman welfare, turns out to be another simple personal opinion that Nietzsche, by using stylistic

figures where the logical argument was insufficient, is trying to certify as a historical truth. Of course,

revolving around these theses, Nietzsche’s thinking will develop its analyzes of the dimension of the

emotional human experience, postulating some decisive components for the whole subsequent

European cultural development, among which the importance of feelings in philosophy and the

inauguration of the abysmal psychology or the criticism of theological doctrines and of the manipulator

superstition belonging to the great doctrinal religious systems. But, for Nietzsche, just like for other

thinkers who opened new spiritual horizons, the dangerous fascination of the rejection and of the

replacement of Christian revelation with an ontic and axiological utopian scenario proved to be

generating important misunderstandings and obscure interpretations.

At the core of the Nietzschean utopia, there is the concept of Supra-human . One of the few authors

who pushed the analysis of this concept further than Nietzsche was Dostoyevsky. Coming from another

tradition of thinking and addressing the issue of the utopia related to the inauguration of an absolute

human empire, with no connection or direct reference to Niezschean type scenarios, Dostoyevsky will

exhibit the glorified image of the man who surpassed himself, by turning into a Super-human or into

the man-god . The era of this man-god would be characterized by the full submission of nature, by the

maximization of the exploration and use of its resources, so that all people can enjoy the status of an

absolute civilization and technology. Nothing would be impregnable for this man-god and he would act

without the false and manipulative idea of a reward beyond death and of an existence of the spirit after

the occurrence of death. Since everything happens exclusively in the terrestrial space and time, the

man-god should achieve perfection in history not beyond or above it. Thus, the sole axiologies and

ethics would be those which revolve around the human glory that would no longer know the reporting

to the divine instance and to a transcendent dimension. (Dostoievski, 1982, p. 445) The query that

Dostoevsky introduces, at this level of description, is a question avoided by Nietzsche: how will the

man-god evolve, what will he aspire to? The impossibility to stagnate to a certain stage is obvious in so

far as the man-god and his empire are inserted into the spatial and temporal dimension. Everything that

is situated in the dimension of time, therefore, turns into what the man-god’s evolution might head for,

what would he become? Dostoyevsky’s reply is negative and dramatic. The man-god would be guided,

by his own pride, towards self-annihilation. Only acting according to his self-will, disregarding any

natural law in his leap towards an unleashed progress, he will go back, eventually, to his own fellow

humans, and his arrogance will generate the final conflict. In light of the portrait of this finality,

Dostoyevsky reveals the non-substantial idea of the man-god or Super-human. This idea turns out to be

only the image of an entity that is applied over the human being or is proposed in parallel to it but does

not actively go from the active inner dimension of the human spirit, in order to raise it to perfection. By

proposing such an entity as the absolute model for which the man must be overcome, Nietzsche

proposes an entity which is foreign for the human being, a presence which constitutes a slippage and a

betrayal in relation with the authentic ontic performance of the human being. (Berdiaev, 1994, p. 206)

Conclusions

If Nietzsche assumes the role of a full supporter of the earthly values, of the dimension of the

immanence, vehemently denying the possibility of transcendence and trying to identify the absolute

only in the image of the Super-human, witness of the absurd return of the same (Berdiaev, 1999, pp.

41-42), Dostoevsky does is not hindered by the naivety which characterizes the proclamation of the

empire belonging to the man-god, but he projects his contemplative thought towards the future of the

latter, the only one that can give the measure of the value and of the positivity of such a hypostasis. The

pride and the non-transcendentalism of the man-god prove to be fatal, as they increase exponentially

with the lapse of time. Thus, the end of the man-god, his eschatology gives the extent of the degree of

inconsistency and harmfulness of his idea in relation to the entity proposed by the Christian view as the

only component towards which man should aim, namely the saint . Unlike the man-god, the saint is not

self-sufficient, on the contrary, he aspires to a decisively achieved co-affiliation to an ecstatic

reintegration. This fusion, or more precisely, re-fusion should be carried out, as indicated by the early

Christian mysticism, and also by the scholastic one, according to the absolute being of the Divinity.

Here, only the return and the re-making of the divine (Eckhart, 2004, p. 260), can guarantee the

salvation of the man from the sin, which is a capital deficiency that Nietzsche vehemently denied,

considering it the most active bias, salvation without which the man’s spiritual ascension is impossible.

But in order to understand the dark harmfulness of the sin and in order to be able to assume it, as far

more than a religious superstition, it is necessary to adhere to the faith that can lead towards the

resurrectionay revelation and involvement in the tension of a total love . Nevertheless, looking towards

the non-consolatory finality of life and towards its terrible tragedies and lacerations of the soul, that

seem doomed, from the very beginning, to the earthly human adventure (Cioran, 1990, p. 33-35), we

can ask ourselves, along with the profoundly nihilist thought belonging to Emil Cioran, who would

have the strength to be loving, in the proper sense of the word, being willing to sacrifice their ontic

destiny and identity in the name of the compassion that raises the human consciousness to the level of

the con-substantiality with the Divine?

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