Nietzsche Versus Paul by Azzam Abed

Author:Azzam, Abed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL051000, Religion/Philosophy, PHI022000, Philosophy/Religious
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-03-23T16:00:00+00:00

In an age of disintegration that mixes races indiscriminately, human beings have in their bodies the heritage of multiple origins, that is, opposite, and often not merely opposite, drives and value standards that fight each other and rarely permit each other any rest. Such human beings of late cultures and refracted lights will on the average be weaker human beings: their most profound desire is that the war which they are should come to an end.78

If it is assumed that Nietzsche’s view of Modernity is that of an end—that is, of an age of disintegration—these words could be taken to reflect Nietzsche’s genealogical consciousness. This is the consciousness that sees the (modern) body comprising the heritage of multiple origins. One comes to realize that Nietzsche’s problem, emerging from his genealogical consciousness, appears in the resulting self-reflection of the two types of man that he describes. This problem relates to the equality among the instincts that have gathered along man’s genealogical experience. Moreover, this equality results in the lack of a principle that is authentic as well as unified or simple (and not a mere illusion of a synthesis) and that alone can make judgments and evaluations possible. Genealogical consciousness demands an order that necessarily involves self-negation: “sabbath of Sabbaths. … [on the side of the] weak [type of man] … [and] self-control, self-outwitting. … [on the side of the] powerful”79 type of man.

It can here be claimed that it is this Nietzschean genealogical consciousness that leads Nietzsche toward the elaboration of his Pauline practical solution, the solution according to which the genealogical spectrum of man’s instincts is ordered (that is, narrated, in the form of repressed deep history of [Pauline] overcoming). The Nietzschean history of Christianity becomes the history of (Socratic) reason. The history of reason is the history of the teleology of reason insofar as this teleology is that of the instrument which had revealed man’s instincts along history, and which ends by revealing its instrumental essence in the end of its history, in the moment in which it reveals before genealogical consciousness, at the same time, all those instincts that this instrument served. Genealogical reason reveals the dialectical claims of all man’s instincts, and thereby becomes that practical solution which rejects them in view of their historical character. Genealogical reason overcomes the condition of the plurality of equal, indiscriminative, and nonunique instincts by way of negating them all as purely historical (that is, as justified only in the past moment in which they were justifiable and as unjustified at this moment). This is the moment in which reason justifies man’s instincts altogether, and thereby negates them altogether. In order to connect Nietzsche’s opposition between Socratic irony and Jesus’s symbolism with his rejection of irony,80 it can be asserted that the limits of genealogy constitute the end of (Socratic) irony: the end of the possibility that one meaning (instinct) appears on the surface when another meaning (instinct) remains latent, in the moment, moreover, in which genealogical reason brings all possibly knowable instincts to the surface.

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