Renewing mythopoetic power with material evolution (from the archive)

The transfiguring goal for Friedrich Nietzsche in his early writings was the creation of great men, a republic of genius. Although that is important it is not nearly enough. Renewal requires the religious goal of our material evolution to Godhood in the cosmos, which brings a far more exalted renewal of consciousness, and contains the power to revive religion, philosophy and art in the modern world.

Early Nietzsche could not see his way out of the loss of both religion and science other than through the rebirth of art-myth as a guide to truth, along with creating individual great men as the goal of culture. Nietzsche thought that this loss of myth was the result of the reasoning ideal of Socrates which supposedly destroyed myth, and also after the “historical sense” and the abstract pursuit of knowledge for knowledge sake in modern times further destroyed myth and religion. Kant helped this destruction along by showing the limits of knowledge, and Schopenhauer by adding the Will as the superior force to all knowledge.

But we don't have to loose reason with religion or lose science with religion. Theological materialism continues the alliance of faith and reason but with an evolutionary, nonspiritual, material view of Godhood and Logos, with religion affirming an ordered, rational, material, evolution to supermaterial Godhood. Evolution moves inevitably in a pattern, even though it has its random elements, and the pattern has a discernible direction, in spite of instances of stagnation and retreat, toward higher and higher more effective living forms, all the way toward ascending levels of Godhood---science can help it along the way.

It is not tragic music, as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer thought, which expresses “the immediate language of the will,” it is evolution. It is not the will to power but the material inward evolutionary will to live, or Tirips, that activates evolution to ascending levels of Godhood, which evolution and natural selection then shapes. That is the real and deepest source for a renewal of mythopoetic power; evolution is the source of the super-epic for art, affirming the struggle to attain Godhood. Art can bring religion to life but it is not religion.