When I started my Nietzsche project, my daughter warned me that one should only take Nietzsche in small doses. Much to my chagrin, I ignored her advice and soon found myself in the deep, dark woods of pessimism and despair. Little did I know that it would be Carl Jung who would lead me out. It is well known that Nietzsche spent his final decade in a state of madness, and Jung provides valuable insights into this as well.
As I mentioned in the previous post, Nietzsche’s primary mission, as he saw it, was to construct a metaphysics and morality that he hoped would eventually replace Christian theology, morality, and metaphysics. Nietzsche was a traditionalist. He did not want to destroy the traditional European “house”; rather, he was trying to save it from being destroyed by the prevailing winds of modernism and an increasingly materialistic, frenetic culture, which he loathed. He simply wanted to replace its rotting foundation of Christianity—a Herculean task, to say the least. Thus, I call Nietzsche a revolutionary anti-modern traditionalist—a paradox, indeed, which makes his ideas difficult to pigeonhole.
Nietzsche, a Lover of All Things Greek
Nietzsche loved ancient Greek culture. To say he was enamored with it would be an understatement. This reverence for Greek culture did not originate with him, though. Rather, the idealization of Greek culture was an unchallenged belief in Germany ever since Goethe and others, in the late 18th century, made it preeminent in German thinking and academia. This spawned fields of study such as philology, whose job was to parse every syllable and analyze every accent mark of the classical Greek language, with an emphasis on the “anal” of analyze. Of course, Nietzsche, being the contrarian, found fault not only with Goethe’s view of ancient Greece but also with modern German philology, which he came to despise as producing “chalk dust from chalk.” According to Nietzsche:
Attention must be paid to the real Greeks, not the sentimentalized, ‘gold paper-wrapped’, ‘castrated’ image of them that has been dominant since the 18th century.
Revival of Classical Greek Religion
Greek culture became, for Nietzsche, an indispensable part of this “new society.” He understood that a society needed to be founded on a universal “religion.” He was astute enough to realize that a society without a common, unified religious belief was doomed to chaos and anarchy, presciently predicting the state of the modern West today. This insight was not lost on Carl Jung, but more on that later.
However, by “religion,” Nietzsche did not mean an “other-worldly” transcendent religion such as Christianity but an earthly religion. Nietzsche had rejected transcendence in favor of naturalism. Salvation, if it were to be found, would be found on earth, for there was no life beyond this present existence. This also raises the question of death, which all religions must answer if they are to have integrity. Like a person feverishly trying to square a circle, Nietzsche tried in vain to find an answer to an earthly religion that allayed humanity’s greatest anxiety, never achieving success.
The closest he came was the concept of “eternal recurrence,” a concept he borrowed from the Presocratic philosopher Anaximander. In eternal recurrence, the cycle of life repeats itself ad infinitum. But unlike in the movie Groundhog Day, a person would repeat all of their decisions for the rest of eternity—so you’d better get it right the first time. There is no concept of doing better the next time, which places a heavy weight on all of our daily decisions. Rather than providing comfort, I think this is Nietzsche’s way of saying that our lives have meaning, but it produces the opposite effect.
Art as Salvation
The second major plank, besides Greek religion, of his new society, emphasized especially in his early years, was salvation through art, particularly the visual arts and music. In his early Schopenhauer-Wagner years, when he still believed in the idea of transcendence, he envisioned both an Apollonian art that was primarily visual, revealing this earthly life in its true form, including suffering—albeit beautified to make it tolerable—and Dionysian art, mainly Wagnerian music, that transported the listener to a metaphysical dimension, freeing them from all earthly suffering, where they became one with the universal pantheistic consciousness. An example of the first would be something like The Wounded Soldier by Induno, and an example of the second would be Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. In Nietzsche’s later years, he would come to abandon both Schopenhauer and Wagner for philosophical reasons.
In his middle years, he abandoned Dionysian transcendence altogether since he rejected the concept. However, he later came to view Dionysian art as an earthbound art meant not just to beautify suffering but to find the redemptive good in it (“What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger”). So, when I go to the art museum, I can see the beauty in my sufferings, and when I listen to a Beethoven symphony, I can see the good in it. This perspective is far from the modern “escapism” tendency with which many contemporary viewers approach art and that Nietzsche criticized even in his day.
The Dionysian god or man can allow himself not only the sight of what is terrible and questionable but also the terrible deed and every luxury of destruction, decomposition, negation; in his case, what is evil, absurd, and ugly seems, as it were, permissible owing to an excess of procreating, fertilizing forces capable of turning any desert into a lush farmland.
-Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sec. 370
Art and Greek Religion
Nietzsche’s solution for preserving traditional European society was to replace what he viewed as the pessimistic and self-loathing Christian religion with a much more positive classical Greek religion, accentuated by the visual and musical arts. He envisioned temples that would provide religious cohesion to society, reinforced through the arts, as he believed that without such a focal point, a unified society would not be possible. These temples would serve as society’s focal points, where inhabitants would share art in common, much like how Christian churches held a prominent place in European cities and towns. Nietzsche may have drawn this idea in part from his childhood in Naumburg, where he noted that one could see the towering church steeple from any part of the city.
The purpose of all this was to provide a foundation for embracing and finding meaning in earthly life alone, rather than in the “otherworldly” Christianity, which Nietzsche regarded as a fantasy that had deceived and continued to deceive many. To experience life in its fullness, he argued, one must embrace and make the most of this earthly existence rather than placing all one’s hopes in the life to come. Both a revived Greek religion and art would facilitate this, as the Greek gods were not otherworldly but had natures similar to humans, except for being immortal. Thus, humans could relate to the Greek gods in all their flaws, which reflected our own human nature, unlike Christianity’s constant imposition of ideals that made individuals feel they were always falling short.
Practically, Nietzsche envisioned “temples” in the center of each community, modeled after ancient Greek temples, serving as focal points for “worship.” The “hymns” would be sublime secular music, and the “iconography” would consist of beautiful works of visual art.
However, this new culture never materialized—it was a non-starter. If Europe, according to Nietzsche, was abandoning the organized religions of Catholicism and Lutheranism, why would it then turn around and adopt another organized religion with analogous beliefs and practices? This new “experiment” was never tried anywhere. What was left instead was the destruction of the old order, which Nietzsche accurately predicted, as well as the chaos and nihilism he foresaw if a suitable replacement was not found. In short, he predicted the 20th century.
Beyond Good and Evil
The problem Nietzsche saw with abandoning Christian metaphysics, which Europe seemed happy to do—especially Germany (“no one believes in that stuff anymore”)—was that Europeans still held onto Christian morality, the “ought.” This was detrimental, as it was world-denying rather than world-affirming, and led people into natural despair and self-loathing. Nietzsche imagined Christians always walking around psychologically (and maybe literally!) flagellating themselves for continually falling short of the ideal. This had to change. A new morality was needed, thus the purpose of Beyond Good and Evil: to do away with traditional notions of good, evil, and, by extension, sin.
The Catholic Sacrament of Confession, also known as Reconciliation, actually addresses this concern. Since Lutherans and other Christian denominations had abandoned that practice, and Nietzsche grew up as a Lutheran in the anti-Catholic, Reformation part of Germany, the absence of this sacrament in those areas left a huge void in resolving the gap between the “ought” and the “is.” Absolution by an ordained priest upholds the integrity of objective morality, while at the same time cleansing the receiver ontologically of sin and a guilty conscience.
I will digress a bit on this subject and say that the value of such confessions was not lost on the Freudian psychoanalytic community. Freud did indeed see the value of such a practice, even though he, like Nietzsche, rejected the religious presuppositions behind it. Nevertheless, Freud incorporated such “talk” into his psychoanalytical paradigm. We could say, then, that this is a deep-seated human need—to be absolved of one’s sins—that has led to the rise of a counseling industry in the West. In part, the counseling industry has dispensed with the “ought,” which would have pleased Nietzsche, but it has also recognized that there is a real need present. Indeed, the waiting lists to see counselors prove the point.
Even in Protestant churches, there are “accountability groups” where men and women meet to discuss and try to resolve their shortcomings. On a larger scale, the television industry has affirmed this need, starting with The Oprah Winfrey Show and continuing with the extremely popular Dr. Phil, where people confess their most egregious faults before the entire world.
Similarly, on social media, there is no shortage of examples where people lay bare their innermost dark secrets for all to see. All of this has sprung up because of an innate human need—humans who have an indelible moral conscience—to deal with the reality of falling short of an objective moral standard. We are incurably moral creatures, and it is the objective standards of morality and the corresponding moral conscience that Nietzsche tried to eliminate. But that was Nietzsche’s solution: to put Christian morality on the chopping block. What he tried to replace it with is intriguing, to say the least.
Below are a few random quotes from his second-to-last work, The Antichrist:
The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole “moral order of the world,” was set up against science—against the deliverance of man from priests.
The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrines of “grace,” of “salvation,” of “forgiveness”—lies through and through, and absolutely without psychological reality—were devised to destroy man’s sense of causality
When the natural consequences of an act are no longer “natural,” but are regarded as produced by the ghostly creations of superstition—by “God,” by “spirits,” by “souls”—and reckoned as merely “moral” consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons, then the whole ground-work of knowledge is destroyed —then the greatest of crimes against humanity has been perpetrated
The Will to Power and the Rational Egoist
Certain Nietzschean phrases have made their way into popular culture, perhaps the most famous of which is his idea of the “will to power.” One challenge in reading Nietzsche is that his entire body of work represents an evolution in his thinking. He changes his mind multiple times throughout his works, sometimes even within the same piece, often disagreeing with himself. Another aspect of his philosophy is that he scatters various concepts throughout his writings, sometimes presenting them in complete form and at other times only in seminal form. The “will to power” is one such concept. He mentions it in various ways, but it gains prominence in Beyond Good and Evil.
The will to power is essentially a modified form of Darwinism. Schopenhauer anticipated Darwinism before Darwin himself, and this is where Nietzsche first encountered the idea. Later, Nietzsche rejected much of Schopenhauer’s beliefs, particularly his metaphysics, but he nevertheless held onto the idea of egoism as the main driver in humanity. Schopenhauer believed that, in a world full of suffering, the main impetus for human beings is the will to live. Thus, we are all natural egoists who seek nothing but survival, much like animals, scratching and clawing our way through life. Schopenhauer earned his moniker as the “pessimistic philosopher” honestly—he certainly could never have worked for Hallmark.
Nietzsche adopted this idea of “egoism” and elevated it to what he called “ideal egoism.” What gives this earthbound life meaning is acting in our own self-interest for the benefit of the community. It is in this way that society can be regenerated. This dovetails with the will to power, which posits that we all desire dominance or mastery over others. We can use this drive—this will to power—to achieve mastery over the society in which we live, fleshing out our ideal egoism by acting in our own self-interest, for the benefit of others.
For example, if I aim to start a windshield repair business, I can establish it to gain wealth and status in the community, knowing that I am the best at windshield repair and the best businessman in the city. Even though I am acting out of pure self-interest, I am benefiting the community by providing a needed service, not to mention creating jobs and paying taxes. We see Nietzsche’s concept of egoism developed even further in Ayn Rand’s writings, as she elevated “selfishness” to a virtue for the benefit of society—an idea that many conservatives on the right still espouse today as the “engine” driving modern capitalism. Ayn Rand calls this concept rational selfishness.
Nietzsche the “Aristocrat”
All of this leads us to Nietzsche’s political philosophy. Nietzsche paradoxically believed societies needed conformists. The majority of the conformist population prevented chaos. At the same time, he required a small minority of “free thinkers.” They provided change and ensured survival. This brings us back to Darwin and the survival of the fittest. The human species continues to propagate, but it encounters changes that require adaptation. According to Darwin, this occurs through the mechanism of mutation, some of which are beneficial and enhance survival. Nietzsche viewed free thinkers as this small minority, acting as “mutations” in society that enhance its survivability.
At the time, free thinkers in Europe emerged and eschewed organized religion and social conventions. These individuals advocated for women’s emancipation and workers’ rights. The European Bohemian subculture is a prime example, serving as a precursor to the jazz movement of the 1920s and the hippie movement of the 1960s.
According to Nietzsche, most free thinkers were second-tier thinkers. They had recognized their egoism but were not capable of implementing the positive changes society needed. Nietzsche sought first-tier free thinkers—those with the proper drive and intelligence to lead society. Humorously, Nietzsche searched in vain for such thinkers and could find no one other than himself! He bemoaned, “If only I could find another free thinker of my caliber.”
He believed society should be led by free thinkers like himself, who would dictate the correct path through their will to power. This system would work well, in his view, because most people are conformists and simply want to be led in the right direction. While Nietzsche did not use the word “aristocrat,” this is essentially what he advocated. This becomes evident after critics panned Beyond Good and Evil. They criticized Nietzsche as “anti-democratic” and an aristocrat. The democratic spirit in Europe was at its peak when Nietzsche attacked a sacred cow with his criticism.
Nietzsche saw democracy as a system where the ignorant ruled through chaos and upheaval. Judging by the political conditions of the West today, I would completely agree with him; I share Nietzsche’s pessimism for modern democracy. On the other hand, Nietzsche was no statist—far from it. He viewed nationalism and statism as a tyrannical will to power, where the unintelligent ruled with an iron fist to the detriment of society, akin to a five-year-old playing with a hand grenade. He sought Plato’s philosopher-king, and I tend to agree with him. We need wise and virtuous statesmen, gifted above the rest. If we choose our leaders from the mediocre and corrupt, we will get a mediocre and corrupt government.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
No religious movement is complete without a Bible. Nietzsche aimed to create one with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The work is a fictional account. It is presented as a story or play. The prophet Zarathustra personifies Nietzsche. He seeks to enlighten ignorant villagers with new ideas. If the Greek temple and Greek art provided the religious structure and liturgy, then Zarathustra would provide its Bible.
Zarathustra proclaims Nietzsche’s famous declearation that “God is dead” and that the only meaningful existence is this earthly one. Don’t listen to the dry academic, for he has no insight; rather, seek out meaning for yourself in your earthly existence, especially through art. Nietzsche was not a postmodernist, as some like to claim, nor even a nihilist. Rather, Nietzsche believed that there was Truth to be found, but we must all search for it—not in the heavens, which do not exist, but here on earth. We are not seeking “my truth,” but the truth. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche uses overtly religious language, paralleling the life of Christ. He wasn’t anti-religion; he was anti-otherworldly religion.
I, along with many who knew him, see Nietzsche as a deeply spiritual and religious person. He could not escape his rich formation in German Lutheranism from his childhood. Instead, he sought to create a new religious substitute for ailing Christianity. He declared himself the new “Christ” through his alter ego, Zarathustra. When he went mad, he thought that he was Dionysius. This is why he was not bothered by critiques from peers, critics, academics, or religious leaders. Zarathustra’s rejection by society illustrates that Christ must be rejected for his truth to prevail.
Carl Jung’s Critique of Nietzsche
I believe Carl Jung’s analysis of Nietzsche is the best that I have encountered to date. Jung admired Nietzsche tremendously as an intellectual equal, even though he disagreed with much of what Nietzsche had to say.
Jung saw Nietzsche as incurably religious. He would say this not just about Nietzsche, but about humanity in general. According to Jung, we are made for the transcendent. This is true not only because the transcendent exists, but also because we are spiritual creatures. Jung believed that all people yearn for the transcendent. He viewed this psychologiclly as an unquenchable thirst for immaterial archetypes.
He saw Nietzsche’s failure in his belief that an exclusively earthly religion could align with human nature. According to Jung, trying to eliminate the transcendent leads to despair. He also failed to answer the fundamental problem of human existence: death. All religions must address this issue. I will conclude with Nietzsche’s “answer” to death.
Jung saw Nietzsche as someone who denied religion but sought to affirm it. Nietzsche’s prophet Zarathustra replaces Christ. As Zarathustra, Nietzsche becomes the god of his new religion. Jung believed this split between Nietzsche’s denial of the supernatural and his divine role drove him to madness because he had pronfoundly bifrucated himself.
Jung Predicts the Future through Nietzsche
Like Nietzsche, Jung was concerned about the implications of eliminating Christianity in the West. They both foresaw that this would lead to nihilistic despair. Nietzsche’s solution was to create a replacement religion; Jung was not so optimistic. He saw Nietzsche’s attempt as opening Pandora’s box of ills that would become evident as the 20th century progressed. In this way, I don’t see Nietzsche’s ideas as coming out of thin air, so to speak. I think Europe was heading this way post-Enlightenment. However, Nietzsche’s work was needed for this thinking to surface and gain cohesion. Nietzsche simply brought these ideas to the forefront and gave them a semblance of form and substance. He also lent credibility to those who had finally admitted their disillusionment with Christianity. He allowed the skeptics to “come out of the closet” if you will.
Jung predicted that Nietzsche’s ideas would cause a collapse of Christian thinking and morality in the West. This would be followed by two or three hundred years of what he called the “isms.” These turned out to be communism, socialism, progressivism, conservatism, feminism, and the like. These “isms” would dominate society. They could even destroy it until people rediscovered transcendent archetypes. Found mainly in religion and psychology, these archetypes offer a path to renewal. He believed this would happen because human nature cannot be suppressed and will inevitably expresses itself.
Jung’s most devastating critique of Nietzsche’s philosophy is this: Nietzsche declared that God is dead. This is similar to the ancient Roman Christians declaring the god Pan dead due to Christ’s ascendancy. Jung argued that if the Greek god Pan and Greek religion could live again, why couldn’t Christ and Christianity be “resurrected” in the future?
This is not to say that Nietzsche was entirely wrong. He had keen insights into the ills of modernity. While his remedy was flawed, his diagnosis was sometimes correct. His general view of modernity strongly resonates with me. He refers to himself as “a wanderer in society” vis-à-vis a “superficial” Western culture. Beyond Good and Evil is divided into two parts. Part 1 covers theoretical philosophy. Part 2 delves into practical philosophy. In Part 2, he critiques modern culture. I highly recommend reading it if you want to learn more about his cultural critique of the West.
Our Need for Transcendence
Interestingly, this aligns with what medieval Christian theologians and philosophers believed, although expressed in explicitly Christian terms. They said that we should spend the first half of our lives discovering and forming ourselves. We should exercise our wills to reach upward and commune with God. In the latter half of our lives, God’s wisdom, power, and love flow into us. Of course these are not air tight compartments, but general trends. Paradoxically it is only when we lose ourselves in Him that we find our true selves.
People universally manifest this desire for transcendence throughout the world. Even Eastern religions aim for “losing oneself” in the One, whether that be Brahman or some form of nirvana. Much of our suffering in the West stems from seeking to meet our transcendent needs in earthly existence. This is enough to drive anyone to madness, including Nietzsche.
Nietzsche’s Elusive Search for Transcendence and Descent into Madness
Nietzsche formulated these thoughts at the end of his writing career, just before his descent into madness. His vehemence against Christianity and Jesus Christ increased dramatically at this time. As his mind unraveled and he descended into the abyss, he grasped for transcendence. He realized that they needed more than just Dionysus. But what would the nature of this transcendence be?
Nietzsche redefined what “being” was, particularly concerning human beings. Based on other philosophers’ readings, he believed humans were non-being, lacking substance. We were not beings but “becomings.” The person, in the grand scheme of things, was a non-person—a bundle of energy, diffuse. This ontology of non-being was, in reality, Buddhist ontology. The ultimate goal of existence is to merge with the “primal unity,” where all distinctions between things vanish.
Salvation involves the transcendence of the ego., not toward God but to the Primal Unity. Here, the self gets obliterated, merging into the eternal oneness—the totality of existence. This was Nietzsche’s attempt to solve the problem of death. As long as we hold onto our egos, death remains a real problem because of our will to survive. He proposed the answer was to transcend our egos and become one with the “eternal joy of becoming”.
A few months after writing these ideas, he descended into madness, which lasted ten years until he died in 1900. What caused his madness? It could be, as Jung suggested, that he bifurcated himself, denying God’s existence while simultaneously trying to become God himself. I believe that there is truth in that. Or, from a theological perspective, one could say that God “struck” Nietzsche with madness as a punishment for his blasphemies. From my perspective, God simply gave Nietzsche what he wanted, to live in the reality he created in his own mind.
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Deo Gratias!
Featured Book:
This is a deeply insightful short book explaining what it means to be a human person and how the pursuit of transcendence is essential to human nature. ISBN – 13: 978-0874621600
Movie Recommendation:
YouTube Resource:
Carl Jung: The Real Reason for Nietzsche’s Madness This video by Essentials is one of the best analyses of Nietzsche I have encountered. It is a sympathetic, yet truthful and penetrating perspective of the psychology of Nietzsche through the lenses of his personality and philosophy. The presenter explains Nietzsche via Jung in a way that helps demystify the person that many consider to be an enigma.
Bibliography and Further Reading:
1- Nietzsche, Frederick, Beyond Good and Evil
2- Nietzsche, Frederick, The Gay Science
3- Nietzsche, Frederick, Dawn
4- Nietzsche, Frederick, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
5- Nietzsche, Frederick, The Birth of Tragedy
6- Jung, Carl, The Psychology of Religion, ISBN -13 978-0300001372
7- Young, Julian, A Philosophical Biography, Cambridge University Press, 2020, ISBN 978-0-521-87117-4
