RICHMOND SchooleArts & Sciences University of Rickmiad) UR Scholarship Repository Philosophy Faculty Publications Philosophy 2007 Friedrich Nietzsche Gary Shapiro University of Richmond, gshapico@richmond.edu Follow this and addi publications G Part of the Epistemology Commons, and the Metaphysics Commons nal works at: http:/ /scholarship.richmond edu /philosophy-faculty- Recommended Citation Shapico Gary "Friedrich Nietzsche" In The Roulee Companion to Philosophy of Religion, edited by Chad Meister and Paul Copan, 170-80, NewYork: Routledge, 2007 “This Book Chapers bought your Fe and open acess bythe Phlosopy at UR Scholship Repository Ithasben acepted onc in Phlsopy Pasty Pbliations hy an authored dmnitatr of UR Scholaip Repository For more into, lene contact _chelahiprepostoryPechmond ada16 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Gary Shapiro Friedrich Nietzsche's declaration ‘God is dead’ made him notorious as a stringent critic of Christianity and all forms of otherworldly religion. His criticisms are part of a more general philosophical rejection, on both metaphysical and ethical grounds, of all ideas of transcendence (such as classical Platonism). Nietzsche (1844-1900), born into a family of Lutheran ministers, became a professor of classical philology while young, and wrote a series of polemical books against much traditional religious and philosophical culture; he sharply criticized many nineteenth-century attempts to reconcile science and religion. Philological scholarship involved intense study of deconstructive readings of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures by higher critics such as Strauss and Wellhausen. Many nineteenth-century philosophers and scientists were atheists or agnostics because they accepted Kant’s denial of knowledge of things in themselves and saw the consistency of a scientific naturalism that could be expanded with Darwinian explanations of human behavior and culture. Yet Nietzsche dismissed the naive ‘enlightenment’ view that people would abandon religion simply because of rational argument, and warned that an enlightened scientific culture, having margin- alized religion, would be faced with a total crisis of meaning or nihilism. While Nietzsche’s antipathy to western monotheism is obvious, it is necessary to attend to the strategy and rhetoric of his attacks, which are frequently deployed against disguised forms of religion (including the scientific way of life and modern atheism). Nietzsche’s judgments about Christianity are typically directed to specific figures, events, and movements; so he is surprisingly sympathetic to Jesus, but a fierce critic of Paul and Luther and of the German idealism which he saw as their heirs. At the same time, Nietzsche's conception of the human (or posthuman) good is related to Plato's conception of the philosopher as ultimate legislator of values, a role envisioned as involving a wise use of religion as communal bond and ground of culture. In this perspective some of Nietzsche's own distinctive ideas, like that of the posthuman (Ubermensch) and eternal recurrence can be seen as elements of a naturalistic religion- In the late twentieth century some attention has been focused on Nietzsche's complex assessments of a number of non-Christian religions, including Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE The death of God Nietzsche’s signature declaration ‘Ged is dead’ is voiced by several figures in his polyphonic texts. In the allegorical aphorism 125 of Gay Science, a‘madman’ bursts into the marketplace one morning with a lantern, seeking God. The smug non-believers ridicule his quest; they see theism as a quaint, discarded superstition. The madman replies: God is not simply a fictional personage who can be ignored; human culture, in murdering or sacrificing its central organizing principle, now faces the consequences. The smug atheists of the marketplace (secular European society focused on economic goods) don’t yet see that God's murder effectively eliminates any analogous principle of meaning (such as economic progress, nationalism, or other substitutes for theism): the madman says, ‘Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing” The death of God is an event, in a strong sense, the greatest deed done so far, and it may take humans a very long time to acknowledge their deed. It is a sacrifice in which humans unknowingly surrendered their guiding thought for the possibility of ‘a higher history than all history hitherto.’ Describing this as a sacrificial act which the agents have yet to own, the madman asks ‘what festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? and visits diverse churches to sing a ‘requiem aeternam deo.’ As he asks for new festivals and rites and mourns the dead God, it is far from clear that the madman’s ‘higher history’ will be devoid of all religion, even if it involves acknowledging the absence of a single transcendent God. This allegory poses two sets of questions: (1) How did monotheism (especially Christianity) gain and maintain its power, and how did it acquire its ability to transform its otherworldly orientation into the disguised forms (‘God’s shadow’) that bewitch modern thought? (Is it its own virtue, its truthfulness, that kills it?) (2) What role is there for religion (e.g., as communal meaning-giving ‘festivals’ and other practices) in a post-theistic world? How can the philosophical legislator deploy teligion in pursuit of a ‘higher history” Nietzsche’s genealogy of Christianity ‘Traditional Christianity and many other philosophical and religious movements maintain a ‘two worlds’ conception of reality, one level being that of actual and possible experience of embodied human beings (‘this world’) and the ‘other world’ of the eternal, divine, and heavenly. Nietasche’s challenge to otherworldliness is that it involves a denigration of life in this world. Practices of self-denial, belief in eternal divine commands, contempt for ordinary reason and experience, accepting the direction of religious authorities (‘priests’), and promises of reward and threats of punishment after death are all targets of Nietzsche's criticisms. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche's eponymous hero takes his name from the Persian Zoroaster, who invented dualistic religion. In Nietzsche's extravagant parody of Luther's Bible, Zarathustra returns to rectify his earlier teaching. We must recognize that all thoughts of another world are based on wishful thinking, and on the desire to escape from a world of change and suffering. Otherworldly religion and philosophy are reaction 171GARY SHAPIRO formations of weakness, sickness, and despair: ‘It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds — this and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer most deeply . . . it was the body that despaired of the earth and heard the belly of being speak to it’ (Nietzsche 1982: 143). One might reply that even if a belief arises from pressing psychological needs, it may nevertheless be true. Nietzsche responds that those who would keep belief in transcendence (or its possi- bility) alive through such skepticism are committed to worshiping the question mark (Nietzsche 1998: 113). This psychological account may be a plausible explanation of why some individuals find otherworldy religion attractive, but Nietzsche needs a more powerful analysis to understand why ascetic, otherworldly religions play major roles in human history. On the Genealogy of Morality offers a complex account of the development, expansion, and effects of Judaism and Christianity. Nietzsche calls his study ‘genealogy’ rather than ‘history’ because it abandons any conception of a single origin for morality and religion, focusing instead on multiple and contingent factors that contribute to these beliefs, practices, and institutions. His analysis is naturalistic, supposing the post- Darwinian discussion of the history of human morality, customs, and institutions (Moore 2002). As a biologist would ascribe a change in a species to random variation condi- tioned by various factors (e.g., hereditary character, climate, prey and predators, sudden change of external circumstances), Nietzsche explains Christianity in terms of initial inheritance (Judaism), social and historical matrix (Roman empire), and ‘chance’ events like the emergence of civilization. The latter is the unintended result of random variations in which aggressive, nomadic groups suddenly find themselves confined and impelled to construct a world of psychological interiority. Christianity, on his view, inherited a contemporary Jewish culture of ressentiment; it was the religion (at that time, but not before the Babylonian exile in 586/7 pce) of a conquered people whose values were reactive rather than self-affirming. Christianity was positioned for success by appealing to the lower orders of the Roman empire, thus carrying on the ‘slave revolt in morality’ on a world-historical scale. Christianity’s predecessor religions, on this account, were tribally specific. They presupposed a notion of communal debt to divine figures (originally tribal ancestors), payable typically by sacrifice. The more powerful the community, the greater the debt. Once the community sees itself as universal (like Rome), with a single god corresponding to unified empire, the debt exceeds the possibility of human repayment. In the meantime, urbanized subjects forced into an internalized life transform mere debt into ‘bad conscience’; in feeling themselves subject to divine judgment they become their own watchdogs and tormentors. Christianity’s solution is that God sacrifices himself for his debtors, but this doctrine of the ‘Redeemer’ is unsatisfactory because it leaves Christians with the sense of their own unworthiness and impotence. In his last book, The Antichrist, Nietzsche distinguishes Jesus from what Christianity made of him in terms of doctrine and practice: ‘in truth there was one Christian, and he died on the cross’ (Nietzsche 1982: 612). Nietzsche’s Jesus did not present himself as a ‘redeemer;’ his ‘glad tidings’ — exemplified by ‘resist not evil’ and ‘the kingdom of God 172FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE is within you’ — were simply that all could lead a blissful life in the present by surren- dering enmity (1982: 600-2). Such a faith, like Buddha's, says Nietzsche, understands itself as being beyond all opposites (like this world/other world) and is ‘at every moment its own miracle, its own reward, its own proof, its “kingdom of God”' (1982: 605). The small community around Jesus misunderstood his death as a sacrifice for them, blamed it on the Jewish upper class, incorporated popular messianic expectations, and formu- lated doctrines of judgment, resurrection, and the beyond totally foreign to the naive and blissful figure they claimed as their inspiration (1982: 614-16). Jesus was a tabula rasa on which the Church inscribed its desire for revenge against the powers of the world, the Jewish ruling class, and the Roman empire (Shapiro 1988). Nietzsche supplements this genealogy of Christianity with a social and psychological account of its ability to dominate the European sphere of meaning. For Nietzsche this requires explanation because of the enormous paradox presented by the prevalence of ascetic religions (and their ascetic secular substitutes). The problem (in quasi- Darwinian terms) is: humans, sharing the fundamental drive of all life to acquire and expend power, appear to be in contradiction to this same drive so far as their beliefs and practices seem directed at suppressing typical expressions of life, designating them as sinful and devaluing them in contrast to ‘higher’ aims. Nietzsche’s response is that the ‘priests’ (religious leaders) are in fact conservators of the lives of their flocks. They provide them with a totalizing schema of meaning that saves them from the depths of pessimism and despair that they would otherwise experience (Nietzsche 1998: pt. III). The priest is a conscious or unconscious psychologist who shapes and refines human drives, Here Nietzsche draws on his theory of ressentiment. In the absence of religious, ideological, or priestly intervention, the weak, sick, or unhappy blame their troubles on those who are healthy, powerful, and successful. Their values are reactive: they see the strong as ‘evil’; so they themselves must be ‘good’ (contrasting with the strong’s value system, who happily think themselves ‘good’ and as an afterthought name the weaker as ‘had’). Priestly technique alters the direction of ressentiment: priests teach their flocks to blame themselves for their unhappiness, a step prepared by the internalization of affects called ‘bad conscience.’ While Christianity is Nietzsche's paradigmatic version of religious bad conscience, the analysis could be applied to any religion, such as Shia Islam, that involves bad conscience, practices of repentance, and an infinite deity. There are ironic dimensions to this critique of ascetic religion. Nietzsche draws on classical (and so non-Christian) rhetorical forms in his attempt to dislodge monothe- istic ways of thought and their transforms. For example, the Genealogy begins with a sharp contrast between life-denying Jews and life-affirming Greeks and Romans, thus enlisting the sympathy of his presumed anti-Semitic readers. As the analysis Progresses, it becomes clear that, on this view, Christianity is Judaism magnified to a higher power. Going further, Nietzsche attempts to show that presumed alterna- tives to religious asceticism, such as the scientific way of life or modern atheism, are simply secular variations on this model. According to him, scientists sacrifice their Present for the sake of an ultimate truth that recedes into the infinite fucure, and modern atheists are still in thrall to the notion of a final, unitary truth. Science and atheism reintroduce notions of transcendence in sublimated forms. It was Christian 173GARY SHAPIRO truthfulness that inspired the enlightened inquiries that led to doubting Christian dogma. But it can go one step further: ‘Now that Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after the other, in the end it draws its strongest conclusion, its conclusion against itself: this occurs, however, when it poses the question, “what does all will to truth mean?” (Nietzsche 1998: 117). Without Christianity, European culture would not have become committed to truthfulness in the form of scientific inquiry and philosophical reflection. Inquiry and reflection first cast religious claims to truth into doubt, but when turned back on the project of truthfulness itself, they unmask it as a form of the ascetic ideal. This self- destruction is an instance of what Nietzsche calls ‘the law of life’: ‘All great things perish through themselves, through an act of self-cancellation’ (1998: 117). The possibility of such a development is not limited to Christianity; Nietzsche observes the dynamic carried further among the Assassins (the Nizari sect of Shia Islam based in Alamut, Iran which was powerful around 1100-1250). Religion here becomes not only the basis for a thoroughgoing skepticism, but draws active conclusions which Nietzsche apparently approves: When the Christian Crusaders ... came across that invincible order of Assassins, that order of free spirits par excellence whose lowest degree lived in an obedience the like of which no order of monks has attained, they also received ... a hint about that symbol and tally-word reserved for the upper degrees alone, as their secretum: ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted.’ (1998: 109) Did Nietzsche reject all religion? It is true that the writings of his so-called positivist or enlightenment period (about 1877-80) echo many of the modem skeptical discus- sions of religion, e.g., he contradicts Schopenhauer by claiming that religion preceded metaphysics in positing the existence of ‘another world’ and that it did so not because of a religious or metaphysical ‘drive’ but because of ‘an error in the interpretation of certain natural events, a confusion of intellect” (Nietzsche 1974: 196). Nevertheless, Nietzsche's examples and references in these texts are overwhelmingly Christian. Even with respect to Christianity, Nietzsche marks significant distinctions between Protestantism and Catholicism. He argues that the Catholic Church was ‘the last Roman building,’ destroyed by men like Luther who failed to understand what was structurally required for a Church to maintain itself as a living cultural institution. Luther ‘handed the holy books to everybody ~ until they finally got into the hands of the philologists, who are the destroyers of every faith that rests on books’ (1974: 311). By rejecting the authority of church councils and encouraging priests to marry (which led to eliminating the confessional), Luther abandoned the idea of the Church as an inspired living body and stripped the priest of the exceptional aura required for maintaining its mystique. To the extent that Luther reduced religion to an individual relationship with God and unwittingly laid the foundation for critical analysis of sacred texts, he helped to destroy the Church. A Church is 174FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE above all a structure for ruling that secures the highest rank for the more spiritual human beings and that believes in the power of spirituality to the extent of forbidding itself the use of all the cruder instruments of force: and on this score alone the church is under all circumstances a nobler institution than the state. (1974: 313) Only if religion is equated with a Protestant-oriented notion of individual faith in the transcendent can Nietzsche be said to reject all religion. Since Nietzsche views religions as human institutions, they must be understood in terms of their actual devel- opment and operations, not in terms of an eternalistic theology, in accordance with his lapidary genealogical principle that ‘only that which has no history is definable’ (Nietzsche 1998: 53). Religion and the philosophical legislator Nietzsche respects the ascetic ideal, since it is the most powerful system of giving and interpreting meaning yet devised (1998: 106-7). Needing above all to give a meaning to suffering, ‘humans would much rather will nothingness than not will’ (p. 118). Surely, Nietzsche suggests in The Antichrist, human imagination is long overdue in creating new systems of meaning: ‘Almost two thousand years — and not a single new god!’ (1982: 586). If an alternative construction of meaning is possible, he declares in Twilight of the Idols, it will not be grounded in the self-destructive will to truth that emerged from what he sometimes calls ‘monotonotheism’ (1982: 480), but in a powerful act of creation. Nietzsche calls for a this-worldly, affirmative orientation to life. Is there a place for religion in this affirmation? Beginning with some of his earliest commentators and popularizers, it has been widely assumed that Nietzsche's thought was a form of ‘aristocratic radicalism’ or extreme individualism. More recently philosophers have questioned whether Nietzsche ought to be seen as an individualist in any ultimate ontological or ethical sense. Some, including Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, emphasize that Nietzsche questions the identity and integrity of the individual ego, and that he describes the self as a political community of drives that cooperate or compete with one another by turns (Schrift 1995). In this vein, Nietzsche (in Beyond Good and Evil) says that modern philosophy is a demon- stration of the ‘merely apparent existence of the subject’; this thought in the form of the Vedanta philosophy was once one of the great religious powers on earth, showing that modern epistemological skepticism is effectively anti-Christian but not anti- religious (Nietzsche 2000: 257). Others point out that Nietzsche, like others of the post-Darwinian generation, treats humans as social animals, analyzable in terms of their complex history of adaptations, unconscious experiments, and (in Nietzsche's view in particular) their will to meaning (Moore 2002; Richardson 2004). As he argues in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, values like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are the names given to the habits and practices that a people (Volk) has developed in relation to its geographical conditions and its competition with its neighbors (Nietzsche 1982: 170-2). In the twenty-first century it has been argued 175GARY SHAPIRO that Nietzsche was consistent in his dedication to the German romantic and anti- modernist Vélkisch tradition that values religion as a form of communal solidarity and communication (Young 2006). Nietzsche rejected many of the views that later became central to Nazism (anti-Semitism, belief in German superiority); nevertheless, discussion continues whether and to what extent his thought concerning collective values leaves itself dangerously open to being filled with such reprehensible content or if it can be adapted by a variety of religious and political programs (Golomb 2004). Nietzsche admired many forms of religion. In The Birth of Tragedy, he praises the communal myths, rituals, and festivals of the Greeks; these provide a model not so much in terms of their content but as a splendid example of the poetic imagination making sense of becoming and suffering. Nietzsche often compares Greeks and Christians. For example, in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, he writes ‘what is amazing about the reli ity of the ancient Greeks is the enormous abundance of gratitude that it exudes: it is a very noble type of human being that confronts nature and life in this way’ (2000: 49). This is more than an aesthetic judgment of defunct cultures, for Nietzsche sees the philosopher making use of religion for the sake of ‘higher history.’ In this same work, Nietzsche devotes a chapter to the topic ‘What is religious.’ Religion is seen from the standpoint of the philosophical legislator who thinks of the future in the broadest terms. The philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits — as the human being of the most comprehensive responsibility who has the conscience for the over all development of the human — this philosopher will make use of religions for his project of cultivation and education, just as he will make use of whatever political and economic states are at hand. (2000: 262) Nietzsche goes on to detail the importance of religion for the philosophical legislator. (1) Religion can be both a means for a ‘governing race’ to rule and a refuge for the more spiritual or contemplative. (2) It provides means of self-cultivation (asceticism and puritanism) that aid in the improvement of ‘slowly ascending classes.’ (3) For the vast majority, religion contributes enormously to the possibility of their being content and at peace. Yet religion is dangerous, Nietzsche continues, when it sets itself up as ‘sovereign’ without regard to the philosopher's project of cultivation and education (2000: 264-6). Specifically, Christianity and Buddhism, ‘the sovereign religions we have had so far,’ have been religions for the suffering; they help to preserve the weaker and less-promising members of the species, contributing in the case of Christianity to the formation of the mediocre European ‘herd animal’ (a judgment Nietzsche would doubtless have extended to western adaptations of Buddhism). Nietzsche is a ‘perfec- tionist’ in evaluating religions, like other human institutions and pursuits, in terms of how they contribute to the flourishing of individuals and groups (Cavell 1990: 33-63). Cavell claims Nietzsche's perfectionism was inspired by his reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson; Emerson too was a religious pluralist who recognized the value for 176FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE life of a variety of religious traditions. In Nietzsche's case, flourishing involves the creative expression of power, understood not simply as raw force (Kraft) but as shaping authority (Macht). ‘The will to power,’ often misunderstood as a blind admiration for tyranny, is better seen in terms of the artistic and cultural expressions that he explicitly praises: individuals, artists, and civilizations that succeed in attaining ‘the grand style.’ Nietzsche and world religions Nierzsche describes himself as a global thinker, looking at religions and philosophies with ‘an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye’ (2000: 258), and so comments on Hinduism, Buddhism, the religion of the ancient Greeks and Romans, pre-exilic Judaism, and Islam. All of these, in his view, are better ways of managing human life than Christianity (especially Protestantism). Polytheistic religions, like those of Greece and Rome, exhibit first of all ‘the wonderful art and gift of creating gods’: they are collective manifestations of exuberant imagination. Their plurality of gods recognizes a ‘pluvaliry of norms’: polytheism is one of the earliest and paradigmatic expressions of individuality. Monotheism is ‘the greatest danger that has yet confronted humanity,’ promulgating a single normal type for the species, thus leading to ‘the premature stagnation that most other species have reached’ (1974: 191-2). In The Antichrist, Nietzsche sums up his condemnation of Christianity, in part by comparing and contrasting it with Hinduism, Buddhism, early Judaism, and Islam. Religions, in this perspective, are much more than individual sets of beliefs and practices. They are ways of shaping and directing fundamental drives and organizing populations. One text that impressed him was a version of the Hindu Law of Manu (the first lawgiver in that tradition), in Jacolliot’s questionable French translation (Bonfiglio 2005/2006). In Manu’s prescriptions for a segregation of castes, and total exclusion of untouchables (chandala), Nietzsche found confirmation for his idea that cultivating and educating (the main value of religion) was best provided for in a strongly hierarchical society. He was attracted to Jacolliot’s attempt to justify Manu on generally Darwinian grounds, the argument being both that the strongest and most spiritual group (the Brahmins) would flourish in these conditions and that such. a coherent socio-teligious order would also promote the development of other licit groups. Nietzsche seems to have been susceptible to Jacolliot’s claim that Manu’s law was the archetype for Moses and Muhammad. Nietzsche expanded his argument that Christianity was a ‘slave revolt in morality,’ accepting Jacolliot’s premise that Jews were descendants of the Indian chandala and that the Jews of the lower class in Roman times were chandala of the chandala. In spring 1888, Niewsche sketched this theological-political schema in his notebooks: What a yes-saying Aryan religion, the product of the ruling class looks like: the Lawbook of Manu agTGARY SHAPIRO What a yes-saying semitic religion, the product of the ruling class looks like: the Lawbook of Muhammad. The Old Testament, in its earlier parts. What a no-saying semitic religion, the product of the oppressed class looks like: according to Indian-Aryan concepts: the New Testament — a chandala religion. What a no-saying Aryan religion looks like, having developed among the ruling class: Buddhism It is completely understandable that there is no religion of the oppressed Aryan races: for that is a contradiction: a master race is either in charge or goes to ruin. (Nietzsche 1980: 13.380-1) This schema is operative in Nietzsche’s assessments of various religions in his late writings such as Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist. In the latter, Nietzsche denounces Christianity for having robbed humanity of the cultural riches of Greco- Roman antiquity and Islam. While religions all depend upon the ‘holy lie’ (cf. Plato’s ‘noble lie’), what matters is the end toward which the lie is directed: that is, is it ‘yes-saying’ or ‘no-saying’ (1982: 639-43)? From this perspective Nietzsche revalues history's clash of civilizations, as in his anger at the Crusades, whose armies ‘fought something before which they might more properly have prostrated themselves in the dust,’ and he notes the crucial role of the Germans in this enterprise (1982: 652). In the ‘Decree against Christianity,’ which Nietzsche's sister removed when she published the book (and which his editors restored), Nietzsche condemns by name only one of the great monotheisms and signs himself ‘The Antichrist’ (1980: 6.254). Nietzsche, Dionysus, and the renewal of religion In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche diagnoses the modern condition as one in which the ‘religious instinct’ is growing powerfully, even though it denies itself ‘the theistic satisfaction’ (2000: 256). His self-appointed philosophical task is to find ways of shaping this religious instinct. We approach Nietzsche's adumbration of a new (or reformed) philosophical religion by focusing on two elements of religion that Nietzsche praises, when properly understood and directed: sacrifice and spirituality. Nietzsche's Zarathustra calls on his listeners to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the Ubermensch and the future direction of the earth; and Nietzsche's valuations of human beings and institutions are regularly predicated upon the degree of spirituality that he sees them as promoting. Sacrifice manifests the overflowing power Nietzsche sees throughout the human and natural world; the highest power consists finally in squandering, not accumulating. 178FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Religion can be a provocation to ‘higher spirituality (Geistigkeit), vo test the feelings of great self-overcoming, of silence and solitude’ (2000: 263). It involves ‘surveying from above, arranging and forcing into formulas this swarm of dangerous and painful experiences’ with which religions have been concerned (p. 249). Spirituality is exemplified in genuine philosophical activity, which is a combination ‘of a bold and exuberant spirituality that runs presto and a dialectical severity and necessity that takes no false step’ (p. 329; see also pp. 337, 380, 423). While Nietzsche denounces the fictions of a ‘pure spirituality’ and of an immaterial, immortal soul, he reinter- prets both soul and spirituality in terms of immanence. In another vocabulary, they are fruits of natural autopoiesis, emergent modes of thought and action that develop from complex organic and cultural assemblages of drives and conditions. In several notebook entries Nietzsche describes spirituality as an emergent natural characteristic, suggesting that there is an impersonal spirituality in the inorganic world. For example: ‘the world is not at all an organism, but chaos: the development of “spirituality” is a means to the relative continuance of organization’ (1980: 13.37; cf. 11.157, 11.255). In this context Nietzsche's self-identification as the last disciple of Dionysus takes ona more specific sense (2000: 425). Dionysian mysteries celebrate ‘the eternal return of life ... the triumphant Yes to life beyond all death and change; true life as the over-all continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality’ (1982: 561). Expenditure of life in the creation of life is sacrificial, Dionysian gods philosophize, and so engage in a complex form of spirituality. The Platonic Socrates had denied that gods philosophize, because they already possess wisdom. For Nietzsche there is no such totalizing and absolute wisdom in a world of immanence and becoming. So his sketch of Dionysian religion humanizes the gods and divinizes human thought, as it constructs meaning in a world of gendered and multiple gods (Lampert 2006). While Nietzsche is not so naive as to expect an unmediated return to Greek teligion, he calls for a renewal of this-worldly sacrifice and spirituality. The madman saw God's death as a sacrifice for the sake of a ‘higher history.’ While Nierzsche declared in Ecce Homo that he should not be mistaken for the founder of a religion, we might ask why he thought it necessary to issue this precaution. The ‘last disciple of Dionysus’ was indeed not a ‘founder’ (like Manu, Moses, and Muhammad), but his ‘philosopher of the future’ has the task of using and directing religions. Nietasche’s Dionysianism is the diagram of a sacrificial and spiritual religion of immanence. See also Christianity (Chapter 6), Immanuel Kant (Chapter 14), Truth in religion (Chapter 18), The moral argument (Chapter 34), Problems with the concept of God (Chapter 38), Why is there a universe at all, rather than just nothing? (Chapter 41), The sociobiological account of religious belief (Chapter 42), Sin and salvation (Chapter 53), Continental philosophy (Chapter 60), Phenomenology of religion (Chapter 61). 179GARY SHAPIRO References Bonfiglio, T. (2005/2006) “Toward a genealogy of Aryan morality: Nietzsche and Jacolliot,’ New Nietesche Studies 6/3—4 and 7/1-2: 170-84. Cavell, S. (1990) Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Golomb, J. (2004) Nietzsche and Zio, Ithaca, NY: Comell University Press. Lampert, L. (2006) ‘Nietesche’s philosophy and true religion,’ in K. A. Pearson (ed.) A Companion to Nietzsche, New York: Blackwell. Moore, G. (2002) Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F (1974) The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Random House. —— (1980) Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. —— (1982) The Portable Nietzsche, ed. W. Kaufmann, New York: Penguin Books. —— (1998) On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. M. Clark and A. Swensen, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. —— (2000) Basie Writings of Nierasche, ed. W. Kaufmann, New York: Random House. Richardson, J. (2004) Nietesche’s New Darwinism, New York: Oxford University Press. Schrift, A. (1995) Nietzsche's French Legacy, New York: Routledge. Shapiro, G. (1988) “The writing on the wall: the antichrist and the semiotics of history,’ in R. Solomon and K. Higgins (eds) Reading Nietzsche, New York: Oxford University Press. Young, J. (2006) Nietasche’s Philosophy of Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Further reading Conway, D. (ed.) (1998) Nietzsche: Critical Assessments, 4 vols., New York: Routledge. (A comprehensive, well-chosen, and extensive collection of critical essays on many topics.) Fink, E. (2003) Nietzsche's Philosophy, trans. G. Richter, New York: Continuum. (A lucid philosophical guide to Nietasche’s thought, following his writings from first to last.) Jaspers, K. (1961) Nierzsche and Christianiey, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: Henry Regnery. (Explores Nierzsche’s ambiguity.) Kaufmann, W. (1974) Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th edn, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A standard guide.) Pearson, K. A. (ed.) (2006) A Companion to Nietzsche, New York: Blackwell. (An excellent set of essays, with bibliographies and references.) Solomon, R. and K. Higgins (2000) What Nietrsche Really Said, New York: Schocken. (Corrects many \terpretations; a contemporary introduction.) 180