Esoteric Nietzsche

Part I

The Esoteric Nietzsche

     Like a bolt out of the blue it came to me that a study of what might be called the Esoteric Nietzsche was in order. Actually, the concept of the “esoteric” aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy has begun to make itself felt in the written woks of academia, but often the background and training of the thinkers proposing the concept is not always suited to the understanding of what the esoteric actually can encompass. In my book The Mazdan Way (Lodestar, 2017) I specifically explore the idea that Nietzsche may have been on some level influenced by Iranian concepts, which he did not use directly or in any overt way, but rather in an essential and well synthesized manner. For anyone more interested in these connections, I recommend that book. In the passage that follows I will sum up some of the concepts in the Zarathustran, or Mazdan, context:

     Since Nietzsche used the persona of Zarathustra in his most seminal work, Also sprach Zarathusra (1885), it might well be asked: Was Nietzsche actually influenced by Zoroastrian ideas. Some who have studied this question in the past have come to the conclusion that Nietzsche only used this persona to express his almost prophetic ideas in a rather ironic way. This interpretation is supported by Nietzsche’s own writings, as we will shortly see. However, a deep-level understanding of both the ideas of Nietzsche and the Mazdan tenets reveal a somewhat different story. Beyond this also, certain facts pertaining to the development of Nietzsche’s life indicate an intimate connection between the nineteenth century philosopher and the ancient Iranian prophet.

     Nietzsche’s visionary period spanned from August of 1881, when he received the vision of the eternal return on a walk by the Lake Silvaplana near Sils Maria in Switzerland, to January of 1889 when he becomes either insane or divine in Turin, Italy. Among his last works was The Antichrist [1888] which was a full-force frontal attack on Christianity. In an early section of that book, he writes:

          What is good? Everything that heightens the

        feeling of power in man, the will to power, power

        itself.

          What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.

          What is happiness? The feeling that power is

        growing, that resistance is overcome.

          Not contentedness but more power, not peace but

        war, not virtue but fitness (Renaissance virtue, virtù,

        virtue that is moraline-free).

          The weak and the failures will perish: first   

        principle of our love of man. And they shall be

        given every possible assistance.

          What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity

        for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity.

     On the one hand his attack on conventional morality is clear, but on the other he does also clearly have an idea of the good as opposed to the bad. Nietzsche’s robust attack on the weak, ineffective and powerless in life has clear echoes in the Mazdan sense of discipline as applied to the magavans and atharvans of the system. His apparent attitude of being without compassion for the weak and poor is, of course, not supported by Mazdan philosophy. But even there the prophet of Sils Maria might defend himself by saying he lacks compassion out of a sense of kindness, for he says that this compassion or pity (German Mitleid) is akin to a deadly disease which kills both the object and subject of such emotion. Even Nietzsche’s most famous utterance “God is dead,” is explained that it was “pity” that killed him!

     Certainly, the most mysterious of Nietzsche's ideas is his doctrine of Eternal Recurrence— ewige Wiederkehr. It was this idea which he himself thought was the essence of his teaching. Three ideas — the Will to Power, the Overman and Eternal Recurrence — are bound together in a triad: Recurrence is the law, Will is the method and the Overman the aim.

Jenseits von Gut und Böse

     Most adolescent minds interpret this formula as indicating an amoral philosophy, one that denies the existence of the concepts “good” and “evil” so the individual is then free to make choices the only positive outcome of which will be greater empowerment, and the only negative consequences of which will be failure. There is already some nuances of Mazdan thinking here. The individual human being is free to make choices, and each of these will have a consequence and is meaningful. A divine grace will not erase the effects of these choices.  But when we reexamine these ideas we see that Nietzsche is not saying there is no good and bad, he is just denying that they are universal or conventional. That is, they are not always the same for everyone at all times, and that they are not determined by an authority and applied to individuals as “laws.” The authority in question may be a church, government or mob-mentality. It is the individual who is sovereign in these choices. Individuals is sovereign and responsible for their choices, good is determined by effectiveness, and bad is characterized by ineffectiveness.

Wille zur Macht

     The single lexical formula that expresses Nietzsche’s philosophy above all others is Will. The English magician, Aleister Crowley, was no doubt influenced by this Nietzschean concept, and so much so that he made it the basis of his magical philosophy as well. The German philosopher was even more influential in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than he is now. The formula “Will to Power” should be analyzed. The power is the effective ability to create, alter or destroy things, to have knowledge and feel pleasure. This is what the individual human consciousness desires and seeks and the key human faculty for the accomplishment of this end is the will or consciousness.

Ewige Wiederkehr

     This concept, in its extended form which reads: ewige Wiederkehr or Wiederkunft des Gleichen, i.e. “the eternal return or recurrence of the same thing.” From the moment it struck him in that fateful summer of 1881 forward it became the centerpiece of his thought. No one can contemplate it without thinking that it is fraught with mystical connotations. But for Nietzsche it was a concrete reality. The formula recurs in his writings, but nowhere is it “explained” in unambiguous terms. The esoteric dimension of Nietzsche always lies in the fact that he wrote in such a way that the truth about his thought was laid between the lines. This was done so that the reader would not be put in a position of having to “believe” some sort of dogma. In stray unpublished writings he does at one point indicate things that make it clear that with the “eternal return” the extra-dimensional reality of one’s consciousness, or self, re-living life in a sort of “reincarnation. His comment that his only regret about it was that he would have to deal with his mother and sister all over again…

     The essay here is but a prolog to a more extensive work to be entitled “Esoteric Nietzsche.”