NIETZSCHE'S NEO-HELLENISM:DAIMONISM AND MORAL

PSYCHOLOGY

by Michael Francis Brett X

I.INTRODUCTORY REMARKS AND THESIS STATEMENTII. NOTES REGARDING ARGUMENT

III. DAIMONISM IN GREECEIV. NIETZSCHE'S PROJECT

V. DAIMONISM IN NIETZSCHEVI. EPILOGUE: ZOON DAIMONOTHETIKE

I. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS AND THESIS STATEMENT

The thesis of this work will be that Nietzsche's moral psychology hinges on a

philosophical re-appropriation of the psychotheological daimonism of the Ancient

Greeks. This is to say that Nietzsche's philosophy works to shed light on and

respond to certain aspects of the human experience which, while they struggle to

find a place in our contemporary worldview, where nonetheless critical to its

formation from the outset. In some ways, this might be perceived as radical;

conversely, there exist philosophical circles in which the notion seems virtually

common sense – by either logic, some foray into this hermeneutical territory remains

long overdue.

Much of philosophy – arguably the whole of philosophy – remains bound up

to this day in the auseinandersetzung between Friederich Nietzsche and the divine

shadows of the Greeks (GS 108). It is arguable, even, that the most underrated of

the works in his vast catalogue has been his treatise on Philosophy in the Tragic Age

of the Greeks – though occluded often as not from the public eye by its late

translation and the larger volume of already-popular Nietzschean scribblings, it is

here, as much as in his amorous and troubled grapplings with Wagner and

Schopenhauer, that we see Germany's most insightful lunatic learn to move, from

Thales, Herakleitos, Anaxagoras and others. While Nietzsche dedicates the whole

of this book to the precepts and personae of his Pre-Socratic tutors, the larger corpus

of his work is more bound up in bringing these initial Hellenistic lessons forcefully

to bear upon the thoughts of a singular Post-Socratic rival: the philosopher Plato,

Nietzsche's chosen and perpetual nemeton. From these arcane insights, I posit that

Nietzsche learned to see around, behind, and through not only Plato's metaphysics

and epistemology, but, most tellingly, inverted Plato's entire aesthetical modus

operandi – to wit, “where Plato set fire to his poetry, Nietzsche used his poetry to set

fires.”

What I am concerned with here, then, will be the possibility of a renewed

(does one dare to say “post-modern”?) understanding of morality and the ground(s)

of morality, following the work of Friederich Nietzsche and, specifically, of

Nietzsche's influence by the Pre-Socratic Greeks. In a recent paper, Nietzsche:

Methodology and Musike, I drew on some themes introduced in Babette Babich's

exceedingly useful publication Words in Blood, Like Flowers in order to show both

1) how Nietzsche moves, as an author, artist, and moral psychological trickster, and

2) how these movements might appear before the eye of an existentially engaged

hermeneut. Foremost among Babich's contributions was a re-appropriation of the

Hellenic, “Musike,” an umbrella term for artistic phenomena (if I may be permitted

to speak loosely.) More literally, the word is an adjective, meaning “of or pertaining

to the Muses.” What I stress here is the sense in which musikality conjoins us to a

realm beyond ourselves, a realm made present to our Hellenistic forebearers in the

form of Muses and other Daimones, which the Greeks believed brought them into

contact with the Divine. Continuing from this point of departure, my intent here is

to articulate how Nietzsche heeds, preserves, and battles to restore for humankind

the psychotheological insights he discovered in the writings of the Ancient Greeks,

and particularly from their daimonistic worldview.

II. NOTES REGARDING ARGUMENT

It is an unfortunate truism that prosiac style can, often and unintentionally,

preclude the greater philosophical necessity of argumentative clarity. To that end, I

will outline precisely what I mean to say here in advance, to the mutual relief of

author and audience as the work progresses. The next section, “Daimonism in

Greece,” will outline precisely what I mean by the term “psychotheological

daimonism,” illustrating my case with examples from Homer, Plato, E.R. Dodds,

Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. In the course of this explication, I will

focus on two qualities of daimonism which Nietzsche appropriates specifically; the

first being the epileptic quality of daimonism, and the second being the quaility of

theoproximity (both explained in III.)

Subsequently, in the section entitled “Nietzsche's Project,” I will present

Nietzsche's project as a dialogue between two basic experiential conditions, the

Death of God and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, both introduced in The Gay

Science in 1882. Succinctly put, the first is designed to instill an experience,

philosophically and phenomenally, of non-value – put differently, of

theodistantiality. The second, then, is designed to instill an experience,

philosophically and phenomenally, of theoproximity.

Penultimately, “Daimonism in Nietzscche” will show how Nietzsche's project

(as articulated in IV.) retains the psychotheological daimonism of the Ancient

Greeks, both generally/thematically and with particular emphasis to its epileptic and

theoproximate qualities (as outlined in III.) as well as explaining why this model

furthers Nietsche's philosophical agenda. My capstone section, “Zoon

Daimonothetike',” will highlight a few interesting ways that this view contributes to

the standing philosophical discourse.

III. DAIMONISM IN GREECE

Here particularly, some prefacing remarks are in order. Primarily, I wish to

stress that, while I will be leaning largely upon the work of E.R. Dodds' The Greeks

and the Irrational, this is only because of its clear and accessible treatment of

psychological states which may appear obscene, unbalanced, or just plain hoaky.

These same phenomena are treated brilliantly in the works of David Farrell Krell,

Babette Babich, and Iain D. Thomson; as well as John Sallis, G.S. Kirk, Kenneth

Maly, and of course the late Martin Heidegger, who once remarked that anyone

wishing to understand him must “spend at least fifteen years studying Aristotle.”

Additionally, many classicists outside of the Continental tradition remain leery of

Heidegger and Heideggerians often innovative or unorthodox translations and

neologisms – at the risk of coming off as conservative in any sense, it seems

responsible to acquiesce these scholars by relying upon a devotee of their tradition

and not my own, while politely encouraging a more extended hermeneutical foray

into the nuanced and brilliant authors enumerated above, should the reader find his

interest piqued by this work and project..

To that end, let us observe the parallels between E.R. Dodds' The Greeks and

the Irrational and the recently published All Things Shining, co-authored by Hubert

Dreyfus ans Sean Dorrance Kelly, preface their encounters with Hellenistic

psychotheology with Illiadic mythology – through the characters of Agamemnon and

Helen, respectively. Using the same or virtually similar psychotheological model(s),

they explain how Hera could cuckold the most powerful king in Greece, and

Agamemnon, in his turn, could steal a beloved women from even so threatening a

victim as the mighty Achilles – and both attain not mere forgiveness, but heroic

praise!!! In either case, they are excused by their proximity to the gods “at the time

of the incident.” While Dreyfus and Kelly use this as a segue into a particular (and

prescriptive) modality of being, Dodds artfully recaptures the organically Homeric

character out of which such views spring. Perhaps his two most useful explications

for our purposes are those of ate and 'epilepsis:

“Always, or practically always, ate is as state of mind – a temporary clouding or bewildering of the normal consciousness. It is, in fact, a partial and temporary insanity; and, like all insanity, it is ascribed, not to physiological or psychological causes, but to an external “daemonic” agency. In the Odyssey, it is true,excessive consumption of wine is said to cause ate, the implication, however, is probably not that ate can be produced “naturally,” but rather that wine has something supernatural or daemonic about it. Apart from this special case, the agents productive of ate, when they are specified, seem always to be supernatural beings; so we may class all instances of nonalcoholic ate in Homer under the head of what I propose to call “psychic intervention”...The assertion of Liddell and Scott that ate is “mostly sent as a punishment for guilty rashness” is quite untrue of Homer (Dodds, 5.)”

“Epileptics, again, often have the sensation of being beaten with a cudgel by some invisible being; and the startling phenomenon of the epileptic fit, the sudden falling down, the muscular contortions, the gnashing teeth and the projecting tongue, have certainly played a part in forming the popular idea of possession. It is not surprising that to the Greeks epilepsy was the sacred disease par excellence, or that they called

it 'epilepsis, which – like our words “stroke,” “seizure,” “attack” - suggests the intervention of a daemon (Dodds, 66.)”

So, we have two distinct psychotheological states – ate and epilepsis – both

of which relate to and will help detail the daimonic condition. It is important to note

that the former is a kind of daimonism, the latter a quality of daimonism in general.

So what is daimonism, and what is its relevance to Neo-Neitzschean (or even Neo-

Hellenistic) moral psychology?

Daimonism is the idea that affective forces – daimones – enter into and

through us from the cosmos. The Mantinean priestess Diotima explains hoi

daimones as follows:

“They are the messengers that shuttle back and forth between [gods and men], conveying prayer and sacrifice from men to gods, while to men they bring commands from the gods and gifts in return for sacrifices. Being in the middle of the two, they round out the whole and bind fast the all to all. Through them all divination passes, through them the art of priests in sacrifice and ritual, in enchantment, prophecy, and sorcery. Gods do not mix with men; they mingle and converse with us through spirits instead, whether we are awake or asleep. He who is wise in any of these ways is a man of the spirit, but he who is wise in any other way, in a profession or any manual work, is merely a mechanic. (Symposium 202e4-203a6.)”

So, on the daimonistic model, the Olympian gods sent intermediaries to and

from humankind, rather than directly interacting with or intervening upon such

creatures. In the case of Agamemnon, for example, a daimon from Zeus comes over

the great king (epileptically – literally, “striking from the outside”), and effectively

causes him to cross grim Achilles by laying hands upon his beloved; and he tells

Achilles as much in his apologia:

“Father Zeus, great indeed are the atai thou givest to men. Else the son of Atreus would never have persisted in rousing the thumos in my chest, nor obstinately taken the girl against my will (Dodds 3.)”

If epileptic ate isn't enough to grant daimoi a terrifying role in human moral

psychology, one need only consider the notion of thumos, the breathe-like faculty of

the human psyche by which daimoi themselves take hold and work their magic.

This gives the capacity of daimoi for “psychic intervention” an invasive and even

rapacious aspect - “forced coercion,” in the euphemistic parlance of the biologists.

And yet, does it strike us differently than the oracle priestesses' erotic receptivity to

their own immortal lovers? In either, there is an overtaking of the psyche, and,

thereby, a proximity to the gods – this is the moral psychological insight which

earned Agamemnon, Helen, and other psychei gar daimones admiration instead of

admonition, and by which Nietzsche would come to seduce the anguished and

nihilistic modern zeitgeist. So, it is important not only to understand what and how

daimones are, but that, as divine messengers, their presence or absence makes the

gods more proxmiate or distal, respectively – that it is to say, they have the quality of

theoproximity.

IV. NIETZSCHE'S PROJECT

In my previous work, I have alleged that the whole of Nietzsche's

philosophical corpus can be understood as a contrived and performative literary

ambush, designed to pull one into direct phenomenological engagement first with

the Death of God (GS 125) and, subsequently, with the Eternal Recurrence of the

Same (GS 341). These fateful passages, then, are not just sterile aphorisms, but

radical and psychomorphic eriegnen into which the language of Gay Science is

designed to pull its audience in the manner of snares, spiders-webs, or golden

fishing-poles. Before turning to these experiences individually, it is important to

note a couple of things.

Firstly, both of these experiences – and, if they are not experienced, then

Nietzsche's cause is lost – are meant to transform our relation to value (werte), or,

more Greekly and more poetically, to the Sacred (ta theotike'). Moreover, the nature

and the goal of Nietzsche's project depends upon their being read (read: felt,

experienced, stumbled onto) in a pre-prescribed order, with the Death of God

coming first and the Eternal Recurrence following salvifically upon its heels.

So what are these experiences, precisely, and by what mechanism do they

achieve their respective goals? I mentioned (in II.) that the first is designed to instill

an experience, philosophically and phenomenally, of non-value – put differently, of

theodistality. The second, then, is designed to instill an experience, philosophically

and phenomenally, of theopoximity, the attainment of which is, if not strictly

speaking “contingent upon,” then at the very catalyzed on a mass scale by one's

having-experienced the Death of God. A closer analysis of the text will refine this

understanding.

When encountering the Death of God hermeneutically, one must bear in

mind that Nietzsche is not here describing the sort of deicide as planned by Lucifer

in Genesis or Loki at the Ragnarok; wherein some factically existent and divine

entity is obliterated - this would be impossible for Nietzsche; who would never have

presumed (or, for that mater, even entertained) the existence of such an entity in the

first place. Rather, his language here is metaphorical; alluding to the impossibility of

our continued epistemological leaning-upon allegedly divine standards of value.

Nietzsche' polemic is then waged not against Apollo, but against certain methods of

Apollonification – of shedding light onto value by binding a plurality of dynamic

theological potentialities into an affective and daimonic existential singularity.

The aphorism reads:

“Haven't you heard of that madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly, “I'm looking for God! I'm looking for God!” Since many of those who did not believe in God where standing around together just then, he caused great laughter. Has he been lost, then? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child?, asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone to sea? Emigrated? - Thus they shouted and laughed, one interrupting the other. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Where is God?,” he cried; “I'll tell you. We have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren't we straying, as through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Isn’t night and more night coming again and again? Don’t lanterns have to be lit in the morning? Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine composition – Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! The holiest and mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives…who will wipe this blood from us? With what water might we clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed – and whoever is born after us will on account of this deed belong to a higher history than all history up to now!” Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; they too were silent and looked at him disconcertedly. Finally he threw his lantern on the ground so that it broke into pieces and went out. “I come too early,” he then said; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen and heard. This deed is still more remote to them than the remotest stars – and yet they have done it themselves!” It is still recounted how on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there started singing his requiem aeternum deo. Led out and called to account, he is said to have replied nothing but “What are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchers of God? (GS 125.)”

There's a lot going on here, but again, the main theme is theodistality. The

protagonist – a madman, significantly – is harassing a crowd of bystanders as

regards the whereabouts of “God.” While the German of this aphorism calls for far

less tranlsational explication than our next quarry will, it is both interesting and

relevant to note that “mad” in this sense – tolle – has positive connotations of

“wonderful,” “amazing,” or “fantastic,” and the verb form tollen means “to romp or

frolic.” This is The Gay Science in the absolute most Provencal sense of the phrase:

but uniquely, Nietzsche's madman is able to leap and frolic amongst bloody knives,

sunlessness, and overt deicide; leaving the bystander's with a clue that perhaps

things, from the madman's perspective,aren't as bleak as they might seem.

He is also carrying a lantern, despite the fact that it is “bright morning!” The

bystander's respond to this by laughing at him, and asking him ridiculous questions.

The bystanders fail to understand precisely because of the way they engage the

information presented – they read “God” as good modernists Europeans, “many of

whom do not believe in God.” They did not understand – could not have

understood – that this madman came as a harbinger of more chaotic times, and

spoke as a man accustomed to a theology in which God was perpetually proximate

viz-a-vis a vast plurality of phenomenal heralds – “daimones,” if you will. The

question, “Where is god?” is a performative and baiting inquiry, designed to lead its

audience toward the idea that the sacred -in this case, “God” - can have the qualities

of proximity or distantality, as opposed to its being so totally absent that the very

non-presence of sacrality or theoticality remains itself unnoticed. Like the

“standers-around” (perhaps more Angloistically “the bystanders,” or, one might call

them, the “existential laity”), Nietzsche's newspaper-reading audience are

themselves caught in the logic of a post-daimonic worldview which they could not

understand must perish at their own hands. Like all mahagurus since the Buddha

and before, Nietzsche required a non-discursive exercise with which to epileptically

impart deep existential wisdom. Der Tollemensch, then, is carrying a lantern not to

impart light, but to draw the gaze of the bystanders in such a way as to show the

need for it. As far as they are concerned, it is “bright morning,” and, like so many

failed initiates, the light of this sophon bounces dimly off their skulls and souls...

“thus they shouted and laughed.”

By rejecting this lichtung dämonlich - and I leave, for the Nietzscho-

Heideggerians, that my language here is deliberate – the bystanders seem to place

Nietzshce in a quagmire. If all moral psychological activity is daimonic, who's to

say that the light of Der Tollemensch is any more relevant or piercing than the

“bright morning” which occludes it? The short answer is to say something like

“Nietzsche believes that their relationship to daimonism is such that, because they

are not aware of it, they cannot see it tripping over itself, epileptically compelling

them away from daimotheotic proximity.” The mechanics of this are as complicated

as they are simple, and I recommend readers supplement my straightforward

glossing with any of Nietzsche's material on Apollo and Dionysus, or with the

remarks about opsis and 'elios in Heidegger and Fink's Heraclitus seminar and the

attendant companion volume, Heraclitean Fragments, by edited by John Sallis and

Kenneth Maly. The upshot, however, remains that Nietzsche casts the aphorism's

characters, outside of his eponymous protagonist, not simply as existential dullards,

but as being repressed into a state of theodistality by their relationship to 'oi daimoi

itself. In other words, the real, daimonic word has “become a fable,” as Nietsche

describes in his late-period opus Twilight of the Idols. Therein, Nietzsche posits a

primordial or originary “true world”: “attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous

man; he lives in it, he is it! (TI5.)”

Of course, the Ancient Hellenes saw piety as theoproximity. Throughout his

corpus, and particularly in the late years during which this aphorism would have

been composed, Nietzsche made it plain that “piety” had been stood upon its head

(see particularly Genealogy of Morals). So, the bystanders reject this originarily true

world, finding it:

“...unattainable? At any rate, unobtained. And being unobtained, also unknown.

Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how oculd something unknwon obligate us?”

So, even though Der Tollemensch raves ad nauseum the theodistantial

condition of post-daimonic humankind, the bystanders are so far gone as to have

unlearned even the possibility of a theoproximate experience. They have then “killed

God” not by assailing some mythological anthropomorphization of theoticality, but

by deadening themselves to the possibility of theoticality as experienced

phenomenally in the theoproximate state. Moreover, Nietzsche drives this

experience poetically into and through his audience phenomenally, lengthily

describing the appearance of God's death to all five senses, and graphically detailing

the post-apocalyptic abgrund that follows – a theotical vacuum in which neither

light, nor gravity, nor value finds a place to grow or even breathe. Performatively,

the passage is crafted with the aim of bringing the experience of theodistality to bear

upon our psychei epileptically, creating, even temporarily, a phenomenal space in

which the impossibility of theopriximate being is not only necessary, but ubiquitous

and even suffocating.

If the Death of God can be summarized as theodistal, the Eternal Recurrence

relieves this theoproximal deficit – and in spades! Rather than restoring the

unilateral mortal-to-sacred relationship which preceded the Death of God, it lays

bare the essential ontological substructure of human being in such a way as to

provide polylateral avenues of relating between whole pantheons of sacred values.

While less gloom-inducing than its nihilistic predecessor, it is not as hermeneutically

transparent – let us turn to the text.

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again, and there will be nothing new in it, but every

pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything great and small in it must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, even this moment and I, myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine. If this thought gained power over you, it would transform and probably crush you; the question in each and every thing “Do you want this again and innumerable times again?” would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than this eternal confirmation and seal! (GS 341.)”

We begin, “some day or night” - in other words, at pretty much any possible

moment – with a “demon.” It is likely up for some dispute whether Nietzsche meant

a “daimon” in the Hellenistic sense, or “demon” in the Judeo-Christian, as the

german dämon indicates neither specifically and can be translated in both ways.

Very well – let us have it that there is an ambiguous but somehow dämonlich entity

existent within the room, and let us determine it's nature only a posteriori, in the

light of Nietzsche's prescribed comportment toward it.

Also relevant to our understanding of this aphorism is it's setting in one's

“loneliest loneliness.” The german, “einsamste einsamkeit” can certainly be read

this way, although other translations include “reclusion,” “secludedness,” “solitude,”

“reclusiveness,” “solitariness,” and “isolation,” implying that the einsamkeit might

have more to do with a state of distantiality from alterity than with the sort of

longing (or liedung) which the English “loneliness” implies. In this moment of

melancholia, when isolation and perhaps suffering are at their most phenomenally

present, a demon “steals in” and poses a radical question for a consciousness so

mired. Throughout Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche uses the language of

“stealing in” to denote two drastically antithetical ways of being: either self-

deluding, dishonest cowardice (Z 2/15), or the sort of violent honesty over which

one places a silencing hand in order to avert catastrophe (Z 2/18.) For reasons that

will become apparent, I am reading Nietzsche’s demonic antagonist as “stealing in”

in the latter sense, bearing a truth whose power is too violent and vociferous to be

left unsilenced. And yet, he lets it ring forth to his audience:

“This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again, and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything great and small in it must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, even this moment and I, myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”

The creature informs us, in language both poetic and concrete, that we are

blessed or doomed to repeat the smallest phenomenal minutia of every experience,

joy or anguish, that we have ever undergone, again and perpetually again ad

infinitum. Nietzsche then confronts us with a choice: “throw ourselves down and

gnash our teeth at the demon who spoke thus” or to respond that the demon “[is] a

god, and never have I heard anything more divine!” What could make the difference

between these radically disparate modalities of existential comportment toward the

same existent phenomena?

Some clues to this riddle remain hidden in the German text (as I said, GS 341

is more hermeneutically complicated than its nihilism-inducing progenitor, GS 125.)

Let us look at the aphorism's title, “Das Grösste Schwergewicht.” In English, this

has been rendered both “The Heaviest Weight” and “The Heaviest Burden.” It is

interesting to note that Nietzsche elsewhere uses “Last” as “burden,” but I don't

think this poses much threat to the interpretation (TI 1/4.) What does expand upon

these translational offerings is the fact that “Schwergewicht” not only means “heavy

weight,” in the sense of an object with a high quantity of physical mass, but also

“heavyweight,” in the sense of a Brock Lesnar or a Muhammad Ali – a chiseled

specimen of human athleticism worthy of the descriptor “champion.” Nietzsche's

aphoristic protagonist, then, is setting up to be an existential Herakles, heroically

shrugging off the greatest burden to become the greatest champion. I will now

assert that “Das Grösste Schwergewicht” attains this status by inverting their

relationship to ta daimonike.

Before the Death of God, one had an arbiter to regulate humankind's primal

responses to the daimonical, an ethical and existential monism which imposed itself

as holy (theotike') with room only for minute variation within its schema. In other

words, the theotical was presumed to be opposed to the daimonical by its very

nature, sheltering humankind as peccati originales through the Valley of the Shadow

of Death. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in Luther, the theosophical

ideologue who took sin (sünde) as omnipresent, and in whose thought both Modern

Europe and the family Nietzsche had been heretofore steeped! On Nietzsche's

model, however, the relationship of the theotical as the wellspring and guiding voice

of life's daimonical forces returns to its Hellenistic hierarchy of holiness – it is long

time I explained how.

We are given in this aphorism a dichotomy, between cursing or praising –

nay, of deifying - the dämonlich bearer of the news of the Eternal Recurrence. To

deify him(?) is to become Das Grösste Schwergewicht, Nietzsche's existential

heavyweight, and to restore a properly Hellenistic perspective to the relationship of

daimonsim and the sacred (or so I have asserted.) I assert this because I take

Nietzsche to be prescribing a certain modality of existential comportment, one

described overtly and phenomenally in the text. Twice, near the aphorism's

conclusion, Nietzsche hints at the phenomenal state of his champion:

“ Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have

answered him: “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.”

“Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than this eternal confirmation and seal!”

So, we first learn that the experience Nietzsche is prescribing occurs in a

“tremendous moment” - eine ungeheuren Augenblick (“Ungeheuren” also comes up

as everything from “colossal” to “imeasurable” to “monstrous,” and “augenblick,”

literally “the blink of an eye,” may also have poetical connotations as regards an

occluding of the perceptive organ.) In this moment, one hails the daimonical as

divine – as sacred or theotical in my own parlance. This describes not only an

ontological understanding of the daimonic as theotical, but a phenomenal and moral

psychological being moved epileptically (by the newly theoproximate daimon.) For

it is precisely in the daimonic moment when we feel most divinely, most manically,

and most passionately – in other words, in ways that would move one to long

fervently for the repetition of such a moment “da capo!” If I am right, then than

the longing for “eternal confirmation and seal” is really the longing for the

affirmative daimon, for the yea-saying daimonologikon. This is also makes more

sense in the German, where the text reads more straightforwardly “confirming and

sealing” (Bestatigung und Beseigelung.) The common English translation makes for

a one-shot enlightenment, after which life has been comfirmed and sealed eternally.

While miraculous, this is not exactly what Nietzsche said – confirming and sealing

implies a constant participation in a process, a receptivity to the daimonic as theotic

which must respond to the ungeheuren geheuren that is epileptic, daimotheotical

voicing. Das Grösste Schwergewicht, then, is the champion who has come from the

complete and sundering theodisantiality experienced in the Death of God and into a

new modality of daimotheotical receptivity experienced in the Eternal Recurrence.

V. DAIMONSIM IN NIETZSCHE

Let us return to Diotima's assertion that “through [daimones] all divination

passes, through them the art of priests in sacrifice and ritual, in enchantment,

prophecy, and sorcery.” To begin unearthing Nietzsche's daimonological

grundrissung, let us read in the light of this statement Nietzsche's On the Origin of

Poesy (GS 84):

“To ask for a prophecy – that meant originally (according to the derivation of the Greek word that seems most probable to me) meant to have something determined: one thought one could force the future by gaining Apollo’s favour – he who according to the oldest views is much more than a god of foresight. The way the formula is pronounced, with literal and rhythmic precision, is how it binds the future…(GS 84).”

“Daimonism in Nietzsche,” then, takes on a dual meaning: firstly, we may

concern ourselves with how the psychotheological daimonism of the Ancient

Hellenes is re-appropriated by Nietzschean moral psychology, and, secondly, with

the actual invocation and execution of daimonism in the effect of Nietzsche's text

upon the reader. I mentioned (in I. and III.) that the epileptic and theoproximate

qualities of daimonsim would be preserved on Nietzsche's model, and while I think

I've made a plausible case for that, I'd like to root the claim more firmly in

Nietzsche's moral psychology and agenda before proceeding. The above

hermeneutical explication shows that Nietzsche could have meant what I am taking

him here to have meant – a consensus and concordance with his project and canon

should illustrate decisively that he does.

The question I have just put to myself is as follows: why would Nietzsche

want to bring about this existential recomportment toward the daimonic?

Obviously, he is not afraid of angering the gods, in the way that a Greek might have

been. But I believe Nietzsche saw something in the phenomenology of madness

which accompanies the daimonic. Consider the following:

“”It is through madness that the greatest good things have come to Greece,” Plato said, in concert with all ancient mankind. Let us go a step further: all superior men who were irresistably drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad – and this indeed applies to innovators in every domain and not only the domain of priestly and political dogma: - even the inventor of a poetical metre had to establish his credentials by madness (DB 14.).”

...”Ah, give me madness, you heavenly powers! Madness, that I may at last believe in myself! Give deliriums and convulsions, sudden lights and darkness, terrify me with frost and fire such as no mortal has ever felt,with deafening din and prowling figures, make me howl and whine and crawl like a beast: so that I may only come to believe in myself! (DB 14.)”

The above quotations were taken from Nietzsche's work Daybreak, which

was written after his extended auseinandersetzung with Hellenistic culture in The

Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,” but before the more mature and poetical

articulation of his philosophical agenda in middle- and late-period works (such as

The Gay Science, on which I am leaning above.) Nietzsche is able to make such

statements because, inspired by the moral psychological insights of the Ancient

Hellenes and a healthy dose of modernist skepticism as regards the will (cf., for

example, the infamous GM I/3), he notices a commonality in maddened and

daimonic phenomena, in which the will overflows and overcomes the rational

intellect, giving the appearance of sacrality or theoticality to one's present course.

So, when Nietzsche says that all good things come through madness, he is

explaining the role of the daimonic not in guiding us to some objective, ethical

“gut-an-sich,” but in giving the moral psychological or existential appearance of

goodness, without which we could neither act nor, relevantly, undergo the

experiences we might colloquially or preliminarily address as experiences of

“beauty,” “meaning,” or “value.” Nietzsche takes this experience to be requisite “in

every domain,” and points to its prominence in the priestly, political, and poetical

spheres ( ie., the spheres in which morality and other aesthetics are most grounded.)

The second of these quotations, however, exposes the converse side of the

daimonic experience: because we recognize these daimonic experiences as

indicative of meaning or value, we come to equate the sense that our lives, and by

extension the very beings that we are, are meaningful or valuable, with our

phenomenal participation in states of daimotheotic proximity. Thus, Nietzsche can

describe human psychology as craving “frost and fire such as no mortal has ever

seen,” deafening din” and “prowling figures;” that we might “howl and whine and

crawl like a beast” only in order to believe in not merely ourselves, but in the

experiences of sacrality which give human being meaning, beauty, or value.

To put the matter as succinctly as possible, Neitzsche points out a correlation

between the phenomena of madness and the phenomena of belief. Hence, when he

opines candidly that “we should build madhouses for Christians, and nothing else!”

he is actually making a bold, poignant, and descriptive assessment of human moral

psychology (in addition to being deliberately perjorative/hurtful). To read this

correlation “correctly” - or, at least, as Nietzsche would have – we need to

understand that there is only a daimotheotic event – the daimoi, the thumos, the

psyche, and all attendant psychoproximate phenomena are abstracted post hoc from

a singular or monistic initial occurrence. He explains this methodology in the first

essay of his later and more scientific/rational discourse on meta-ethics, The

Genealogy of Morals:

“A quantum of force is simply such a quantum of drive, will, action—rather, it is nothing but this very driving, willing, acting itself—

and it cannot appear as anything else except through the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason petrified in it), which understands and misunderstands all action as conditioned by something which causes actions, by a “Subject.” For, in just the same way as people separate lightning from its flash and take the latter as an action, as the effect of a subject, which is called lightning, so popular morality separates strength from the manifestations of strength, as if behind the strong person there were an indifferent substrate, which is free to express strength or not. But there is no such substrate; there is no “being” behind the doing, acting, becoming. “The doer” is merely made up and added into the action—the act is everything. People basically duplicate the action: when they see a lightning flash, that is an action of an action: they set up the same event first as the cause and then yet again as its effect. Natural scientists are no better when they say “Force moves, force causes,” and so on—our entire scientific knowledge, for all its coolness, its freedom from feelings, still remains exposed to the seductions of language and has not gotten rid of the changelings foisted on it, the “Subjects” (the atom, for example, is such a changeling, like the Kantian “thing-in-itself”)...(GM I/13).” ]

So, we are now in some command of a Nietzschean understanding of the

moral psychological or daimotheotic event. To separate the matter, on his thinking,

into a subjective locus of existentiality (ta psyche) with an objective locus of

psychoaffective force (ta daimon) acting over-and-above it is useful only

instrumentally, and reinforces a dangerous subjectivism within human thought.

After all, if these actions we perpetrate are to be ours in any existentially significant

sense, then certainly we must identify, to some extent, not only with their daimonic

origin and content, but with the epileptic quality of psychic intervention which

comes naturally, on this model, to any and all human acting. So, Nietzsche

advocates (and invokes!) a return to a daimotheotical moral psychology, because he

sees it as the natural order of human behavior; with newer, more subjectivist models

obscuring this understanding at their peril. While he explains this position lengthily

and well throughout most to all of his later corpus, Nietzsche's aphorism “On

Chastity” does an excellent job of exposing the dangers Nietzsche foresees in

subverting the daimotheotic relationship:

“Chastity is a virtue in some, but a vice in many. They abstain, but the bitch, sensuality, leers enviously out of everything they do. Even to the heights of their virtue and to the cold regions of the spirit this beast follows them with her lack of peace. And how nicely the bitch, sensuality, learns how to beg for a piece of spirit when denied a piece of meat...And this parable, too I offer: many who have tried to drive out their devil have themselves been driven into swine. (Z I/15).”

This sardonic parable illustrate the ways in which moral reasoning, when

divorced from daimotheotic reality, smuggles in the “changeling” of a virtue which

drives it against its natural daimotheotic compulsion, resulting in psychic

dissonance and ardor, begged for psyche in the place of its own chosen vice. In

German, the title is “Von Keuschheit” - while keuschheit by itself translates as

“chastity,” “moderation,” “morality,” the root adjective “keusch” seems to have

more connotations of actual virginality. In either case, it's very clear that Nietzsche

finds the keuschheit an imprudent and self-deluded way of being, so self-deluded

that “the bitch sensuality” “die Hündin Sinnlichkeit” will turn her feral claws upon

you in the hopes of beating you “to your senses!” Kaufmann, however, leaves out a

critical adjective in his translation: we are dealing not merely with “die Hundin

Sinnlichkeit,” but “weisse die Hündin Sinnlichkeit” - “how wisely the bitch,

Sensuality, learns to beg for a piece of spirit...”. So, when Kaufmann summarizes

the aphorism in his “Portable Nietzsche” as “One man's virtue is another man's

poison,” what he ought to say is “The search for virtue can become a poison, if we

do not remember who we are and whose virtue we are seeking (by heeding the wise

counsel of our animal sensuality).” “Bitch” or no, this hound has a nose for our own

betterment, and it points back toward daimonic quarry - to the hunt, then!

Thus far I've painted Nietzsche's moral psychology in tones of daimonothetic

monism – the upshot here is that 1) Nietzsche takes epileptic, theoproximate

daimonism to occupy a natural role in the order of our existential and especially

evaluative discourse and action, and 2) he seeks to return our perspective on

daimotheotic proximity from one of sheltered, theodistal, and otherwise modernistic

avoidance to one of self-actualized, neo-romantic or post-modern engagement.

More explicitly, Nietzsche returns the daimotheotic to its natural explanatory role in

human moral psychology. To advance this claim, I've sketched the Ancient

Hellenistic origins and understanding of pyschotheological daimonism (in III),

advanced Nietzsche's utilization of such a view to implant it within the psychei of

his audience (in IV), and justified his reasons for doing so within a larger moral-

psychological schemata (in V.) In closing, then, let's look at some implications of

this thesis for contemporary moral-psychological discourse.

VI. EPILOGUE: ZOON DAIMONOTHETIKE

It is my hope that the work at hand will shed light upon the ways in which

both Nietzsche and the Greeks can augment or illuminate our moral psychological

discourse, by providing a psychotheological model and lexicon to address our

existential or evaluative capacities as extensions of a trans-subjective universe

without compromising the Pagan, Neo-Romantic, and otherwise eigentlich

phenomenality of theoproximate meaning and value. Heidegger even goes so far as

to understand Nietzschean moral pscyhology as a “physiology of aesthetics,” leaning

heavily upon the following aphorism from Twilight of the Idols, the last Nietzsche's

published works :

Toward a psychology of the artist. — If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and observing, one physiological condition is indispensable: rapture. Rapture must first have augmented the excitability of the entire machine: else it does not come to art. All the variously conditioned forms of rapture have the requisite force: above all, the rapture of sexual arousal , the oldest and most original form of rapture. In addition, the rapture that comes as a consequence of all great desires, all strong affects; the rapture of the feast, contests, feat of daring, victory; all extreme movement; the rapture of cruelty; rapture in destruction, rapture under certain meteorological influences, for example, the rapture of springtime; or under the influence of narcotics; finally the rapture of will, of an overfull, teeming will. What is essential in such rapture is the feeling of increased strength and fullness. Out of this feeling one lends to things, one forces them to accept from us, one violates them — this process is called idealizing. Let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealizing does not consist, as is commonly held, in subtracting or discounting the petty and inconsequential. What is decisive is rather a tremendous drive to bring out the main features so that the others disappear in the process (TI VIII.) 

This recalls the sense in which madness precedes great innovation, which I

referenced in the previous section. Heidegger, in the first volume of his Nietzsche

lectures, wants to lean on this trend in Nietzsche's thought to understand aesthetics

as phyisiological and physiology as aesthetic – in other words, to re-engage with the

material nature of our seemingly immaterial existentiality. Like Nietzsche himself,

Heidegger is attempting to restore us to a more authentic or natural way of

responding to (seemingly) exterior phenomena in a way that preserves their both

spatial exteriority and psychical interiority at the same time (he might have used the

term “mitsein,” or “being-with,” to describe such a trans-subjective sense of

simultaneous unity and distance.) This, of course, is Heidegger looking forward;

seguing the Nietzschean discourse into his own, and so into our post-modern epoch.

My stance here has been to look backward, to show the origins of these same

Nietzschean thoughts in psychotheological daimonism (a lá the Ancient Hellenes.)

Both interpretations point to a materialist understanding of what many consider our

most human qualities – to wit, our capacities for love, passion, beauty, value, and

meaning. And both, in their own right, attempt to preserve something neo-romantic

– do I dare say “holy?” - about our existential and spiritual condition.

So, where does this leave us in terms of rejoining less historical dialogues

about morality and virtue? Hopefully, on native soil. Nietzsche, Heidegger, myself,

and probably many of you, have been excited about the possibility of restoring the

experience of sacrality to an epoch which has become as theodistal as it is self-distal

– and with each only catalyzing the other! Where Heidegger attempts to pen a

“physiology of aesthetics,” I have sought a “physiology of daimonosthesthis” from

Nietzsche's Hellenistic progenitors, which begs the following interesting questions

about moral psychology and existential discourse – in short, of aesthetics, meta-

ehtics, and human being.

* Can one have a moral or aesthetic responsibility to a mood or attunement?

As Sinnlichkeit, these experiences are necessarily informative, and, as daimonic,

they do bear directly on our sense of meaning, value, and beauty. Of course, it

seems blatantly nonsensical , if not outright sociopathic, to infer that any and all

daimotheotic presence commits one to acting rashly in any situation. Conversely, it

seems blatantly non-sensical, if not outright naïve, to infer that we can in any

significant sense deny the constitutive role these experiences play in forming not

only who we are, but what it is about who we are that makes us such. Therefore, we

seem to be in some awkward middleground, owing some ethical nod at the least to

the facticality of daimotheotic presence, but simultaneously understanding the

daimonic voice as being within us from the outside, reserving some other ethical

nod, at least, to the existentially-engaged consciousness which we take to be

coextensive with daimotheotic receptivity and presence.

* How does daimonothesthis bear upon our notions of guilt and judgment?

Dodds explains that the Greeks would simply bite the bullet and pay a fee to the

offended party, citing Achilles' forgiveness of Agamemnon's stealing Briseis:

“Let the son of Atreus go to his doom and not disturb me, for Zeus the counsellor has taken away his reason.”

Many people might fear living in a world where human transgression merits

no condemnation, but this fear can be mitigated in two ways. Firstly, as I just noted,

there was a system in place for obtaining recompense for the victim, although this

strictly cultural interpretation of the matter need not apply to all daimotheotical

models. Secondly, there exists a real possibility that a daimotheotical understanding

of human psychology would create a world where people forgave and prospered,

without the existential dissonance and psychic baggage of revenge. Perhaps the

logical conclusion here is that, as Dr. Brent Kalar aptly put it in a 2010 Nietzsche

seminar, “Nature is malevolent, but innocent.” And not only Nature, but by

extension humankind! Could it be that Das Grösste Schwergewicht might speak, and

even speak lovingly, with the voice Achilles: “Leave this suffering to its doom, and

do not disturb me!” `

* How does a daimotheotical model of psychology affect more spiritual

practices, such as prayer, meditation, or hatha yoga? If the daimotheotic is in at

least some loose sense material, then the aesthetic phenomena present in spiritual

practices such as these should be looked up as informative of the daimonological

and psychological topographies we, by our very existence, are compelled to

navigate. More historically, I have to understand the Greeks as proto-scientific,

measuring the stars with a stick from the hilltops of Milesia and observing the

patterns of natural order (and the lack thereof!) in Ephesus. With this in mind, we

might consider the Greeks, too, prayed, in ways they found gnostic and informative

– the scholars who profit most from insights of this kind will do best to make their

own use of them.

* Where does this leave the problem of evil? As a youth, Nietzsche composed a schoolwork assignment on this very problem, controversially opting to “give the credit to God” and accept that this is how He intended the world to be for humankind. Daimotheotical moral psychology would suggest, in a similar vein, that “evil” (lazily and preliminarily conceived) does exist in the world, as a product of the daimotheotical reality in which we live. It is also suggests that, if the “evil messengers” or kadaimoi are not affecting our own selves, then there is absolutely nothing wrong with “good people” (lazily and preliminarily conceived) becoming divinely inspired to contain, eradicate, or neutralize said evil (though the logic of antagonism often brings its own theoretical and practical pitfalls.) Is this a way of lumping it and admitting, generally, that “might makes right?” Perhaps. But I hear also, in this daimotheotical recomportment, a profound hope that the human animal may be at its core willing and obligated to defend and to advance the understanding that human being is an endeavor toward kindness, coexistence, and symbiotic beautification of the world we're living in – not in spite, but precisely because of,a renewed understanding of itself as ta zoon daimonothetike.

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