Friday, April 04, 2014

Contrary to Nietzsche, how the hero and the saint can harmonize


Nietzsche rejected the saint as the most powerful type of man, saying that all the other values crystallized around the saint, dragging all the senses and passions of life down, which Nietzsche rejected with his aristocratic radicalism. This was overbearing it seems to me and overcompensating and probably quite revengeful of Nietzsche, even though he otherwise saw through the revenge motive in others.

It would have been psychologically (and culturally) healthier to accept the saint as the religious type seeking the God Within in the Inward Path---by way of the conquest of the senses and passions---which can then be seen as a symbolic-experience of the real sacred goal of the hero type, who seeks Godhood in the Outward Path of material and supermaterial evolution---while applying the senses and passions to do so, in an evolutionary way.

Tradition and conservatism and Ordered Evolution---which are the the long term reality of successful human behavior and culture---can harmonize or synthesize with the revitalized religious goal of evolving to Godhood. The Hero (Pagan) and Saint (Revealed Religions) can even bring science and religion together, with no need to radically annihilate the religious ideals in revolution.

Nietzsche later said that we need our enemies to make us stronger, perhaps seeing that he sounded too much like a moralist in his call to eliminate the competition, when he preferred to be known as an immoralist, not a moralist. It seems that Nietzsche was more a radical libertarian promoting or validating only those individuals he deemed to be superior. But the individual requires the group, and group morality, to successfully survive and evolve.  And the old needs to be brought along with the new.

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