The Lion tears up the Child (and eats himself)

Okay, here’s how i see it…

The camel as the load bearing animal is the one fully immersed in society and it’s goals, doing his duty and more than that. Being the one that is the most fully immersed in that societal narrative, he can see best were it’s all going and comes to see everthing as false and pointless.

The lion awakes and he begins tearing down the whole societal charade in his mind, and versus other people too… anger and destruction, “truth” is his virtue that pours out of him. As you can imagine this creates quite a rift between him, the image he build up as a camel, and the rest of society still imersed in society. It’s like saying over and over to a 5-year old and everyone who’ll hear it, “santa doesn’t exist you stupid …, it’s all false, all lies!!!”

Leaving this virtue unchecked, will destroy all his ties with society and eventually himself, because nobody will listen to a percieved freak and society won’t change… it’s no solution in the end.

The child ideally finds a way to overcome this virtue and come up with actual solutions. I can’t really think of specifics or examples of child-like overcoming right now, but i think i do know examples of such a failed cruel hero, in real live, and maybe also in literature.

[tab]You know Herman Brusselmans? He’s popular in Holland isn’t he? He strikes me as the type who is stuck in this cruel truth-telling/don’t-want-to-fool-myself mode, and never really came up with solutions. Maybe he has, but i didn’t really see them then. Both his interviews in media and his books are in that style. Some more interesting trivia, he says he likes Schopenhauer and is influence greatly by Gerard Reve (Editted). Two cheerfull fellas![/tab]

it’s that paradoxical freedom which is at once both uncomplaining self-reliance and unfrightened self-abandonment.

Jakob

Seams I misinterpret Nietzsche. I do have a copy of thus spake Zarathustra, I just needed to get my head back in that space perhaps.
from your link [thanks]
“the spirit becometh a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child“.

Can we assume the child to be as like the fool? As this carries right through the tarot sequence to the world. This way we have something in the child which after all the trials remains, grows and is finally completed. The camels strength is in endurance and its load, this is then transformed into the lions strength, here it appears to be internalised into ‘I am, I will’, the power of purpose imposed upon the world. Perhaps the child’s strength occurs ‘after the fact’ or ‘after the needs’, there is no need to assert ones power upon the world when all objectives to its purpose have been fulfilled. Difficult to explain and understand, but I am just getting a fleeting glimpse of the world card, the man stood there as if no longer seeking, of innocence restored, journeys end ~ though it is all a beginning to being man [superman].

Each of the virtues needs to be overcome that the next metamorphosis may occur, it is perhaps that each virtue is as like the virtue of innocence in the child at the beginning of the sequence [that’s how I see it anyway]. Perhaps it is not that there is anything wrong with the virtue, but regardless the journey must continue and in doing so we eventually reach ‘all-virtue‘; perhaps each virtue is only partial and hence can never be fully attained [like the fool clutching at butterflies] until at last hey all become full as one?

The child at the beginning and end are indeed both impervious to moral impetus. Perhaps the superman is more like Jesus [not meaning to get religious here] than a superhero of contemporary ilk?
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I think there is a language to language, how we mirror one another, sometimes we can see exactly what another soul wants us to see, other times we don’t see at all. You can meet someone and in an instance fall in love, even others can sometimes see it. Point being that we could easily understand this as a metaphor, where the lion just ‘knows’ there is the latter metamorphosis innate in ones being [the witch]. It somewhat more inspiring when this occurs and is not a metaphor!

The same if he attained that level, obviously I havent been interpreting him very well so far, so when I say there doesn’t appear to be completion in his works [more the lion than the child level?] I could be entirely wrong. Equally the African witch may have been at a lower level, displaying some semblance of the full virtue that is in the child.

Thus spake Zarathustra is certainly a very fluid works though, so I could be wrong. There is something penultimate about it that’s all.
:slight_smile:

Further thoughts…

The super-man/person at the end has no message to convey and no one to convey it to, it would seam that one has to be at a given level in order to understand the book or words of that level.

You rarely get someone who attains that, maybe Jesus, Buddha, perhaps even Nietzsche!

Then you get the pretenders to the throne [e.g. in this case hitler] to whom their negatives and failures are inevitably put upon the true supermen.

:wink:

That’s a surprisingly close to home interpretation! I like it a lot. I dont have to go to Brusselmans for an example of this type, I’ve been this type. Looking down on the myths the government spins and being frustrated with those around me who believe it. Until I realized that my aggression. or cruelty indeed, toward my surrounding was actually doing more damage to them and me than their belief in the lies, and started playing the game, looking for ways in which to handle the situation within the narrative. This is also when I realized that the stories are largely lies, but that the general spirit of the culture that is spinning the lies is still worth a lot to me, so much that I am even willing to help telling lies to defend it and sustain it. Lies, of course, are creative, a property of the child. (Now “I Am” this lie spinning culture (every culture spins lies, is a lie, a subjective story, I prefer mine, me) instead of obeying it.)

This is a very fresh look at it, would never have though of it but it makes a lot of sense in a simple and relevant way, and it explains the quote very clearly.

It’s also from 1882 section 4.

I appreciate the scrutiny but I don’t really see a relevant difference between a definitive failure to forge the chain and breaking it.

Diekons reply sheds light on how this “I will the truth” then eventually thwarts power, and turns the lion into a kind of cancer, which is consistent with Nietzsche’s description. The virtue of truth becomes an unwholesome obstacle to participation in the organism and a cruel (grausam) antagonism to it.

Anyway, these quotes (as far as I can understand them or place them in a context which I understand) only seem to deal with the transition from camel to lion, not with lion to child.

What I am missing here essentially is the creative aspect of the child. The “I Am” of the child is in it’s perpetual, self-propelling wheel of creation. Being, when understood as becoming is creation. It is nothing else.

The Camels understanding of being is thus flawed, as he sees things as static, as fixed values that he has to uphold. The lion takes a step to subjectivity, but still considers himself as something fixed, and only his will as dynamic. So the becoming is in him a property of being. Only in the child does the fluidity of existence come fully into play, as this I Am does not say “I Am such and such”, but only describes the process of play, of creative transformation.

This creative aspect leads me to think that the child is as much the Magician as he the Fool.

Nietzsches symbology here is a bit problematic since it posits the child as a the end of a sequence, when in nature it is of course the beginning. The Tarot is circular, but I think that we must not see the metamorphoses of the spirit that way. The Child really is the goal.

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. ~ Picasso

I think that actually the person on the World card does have moral motivations, but that he has balanced them so that they do not hinder him. He is surrounded by symbolizations the four fixed signs of astrology, which which all have their virtues, which could be seen as morals. But is the card below not much more like a creative innocence saying “I Am”?

This card is somewhat the high-point, the climax, of the cyclus of the Great Arcana. Kind of like high noon in the day, mid-summer in the year. Where the World may rather be the time of harvest, of completion, which already premeditates the next cycle.

I would personally rather place the knowing and doing here at the woman projecting her will actively, controlling the lions by concentration. I havent seen the footage, and no doubt she looks very relaxed, but think that if she would drop her concentration, the lions would attack her. The power of commanding presence requires a persons full concentration. Its just that such persons are used to concentrate, they are trained in it, are able to concentrate all day. Which reminds me of something I overheard the other day while having a drink - two french people were talking behind me and suddenly the woman quoted something in english: “concentration is the natural piety of the soul”.

I think that you’re right there, especially in the context of Diekons post, that Nietzsche was more Lion than Child. The quote of the OP could very well be seen as a description of himself, and would quite perfectly explain his collapse!

[size=85]"And he did not manage to overcome / conquer his virtue.
The lion in him tore up the child in him, and finally the lion devoured himself.

Inhuman was this hero, and wild - -
See, I teach you the love for the superman.

    • He took it on him and broke under the load." (Nachlass 1882 4[128])[/size]

I felt that there was something important here, that’s why I posted it, something I did not fully grasp -
thanks to contributions in this thread, I’ve realized that this is Nietzsches description of himself.
He was the wild and inhuman hero.

His own virtue, the will to truth, to honesty, devoured him,
and his own love of the superman weighed down on him until he broke.

Well, at least I think it’s important to note that most people will never even attain the camel-spirit.

That’s not what I meant, though. What the beginning of that note you quoted describes corresponds to the phase when truthfulness is still a moral virtue but has already killed the moral God.

They don’t. Thus, for example, Zarathustra compares the sublime one he saw to a tiger… But I understand whence the confusion springs. After all, I basically said that the lion is still driven by a “Thou shalt”, whereas the child is driven solely by “I will”. I was aware of the paradox when I said that, though. Look:

[size=95]Many heavy things are there for the spirit, the strong load-bearing spirit in which reverence dwelleth: for the heavy and the heaviest longeth its strength.
What is heavy? so asketh the load-bearing spirit; then kneeleth it down like the camel, and wanteth to be well laden.
What is the heaviest thing, ye heroes? asketh the load-bearing spirit, that I may take it upon me and rejoice in my strength.
Is it not this: [a list of examples follows.]
All these heaviest things the load-bearing spirit taketh upon itself: and like the camel, which, when laden, hasteneth into the wilderness, so hasteneth the spirit into its wilderness.
But in the loneliest wilderness happeneth the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becometh a lion; freedom will it capture, and lordship in its own wilderness.
Its last Lord it here seeketh: hostile will it be to him, and to its last God; for victory will it struggle with the great dragon.
What is the great dragon which the spirit is no longer inclined to call Lord and God? “Thou-shalt,” is the great dragon called. But the spirit of the lion saith, “I will.”
“Thou-shalt,” lieth in its path, sparkling with gold—a scale-covered beast; and on every scale glittereth golden, “Thou shalt!”
The values of a thousand years glitter on those scales, and thus speaketh the mightiest of all dragons: “All the values of things—glitter on me.
All values have already been created, and all created values—do I represent. Verily, there shall be no ‘I will’ any more.” Thus speaketh the dragon.
My brethren, wherefore is there need of the lion in the spirit? Why sufficeth not the beast of burden, which renounceth and is reverent?
To create new values—that, even the lion cannot yet accomplish: but to create itself freedom for new creating—that can the might of the lion do.
To create itself freedom, and give a holy Nay even unto duty: for that, my brethren, there is need of the lion.
To assume the right to new values—that is the most formidable assumption for a load-bearing and reverent spirit. Verily, unto such a spirit it is preying, and the work of a beast of prey.
As its holiest, it once loved “Thou-shalt”: now is it forced to find illusion and arbitrariness even in the holiest things, that it may capture freedom from its love: the lion is needed for this capture.
[Nietzsche, Zarathustra, “The Three Metamorphoses”.][/size]
The dragon is not really the spirit’s last Lord and God; or rather, what drives it to be hostile to it, to struggle for victory with it, is the dragon itself: compare my image of the scorpion that stings itself above. So even when the external dragon has been overcome, the internal dragon remains; in fact, it was the internal dragon that commanded the lion to rebel against the external dragon. The internal dragon, however, is simply the internalised external dragon. The question is, then: How does the spirit overcome the internal dragon without being driven by that very dragon in overcoming it?—

(That I’m right in associating the jottings you quoted with “The Sublime Ones”, by the way, may be appreciated from this passage:

[size=95]His deed itself is still the shadow upon him: his doing obscureth the doer. Not yet hath he overcome his deed.
[ibid., “The Sublime Ones”.][/size]
As you can see, Nietzsche changed “virtue” to “deed”. This deed is the “subduing” of the monster “Thou-shalt” (see ibid.), to which the spirit was driven by the youngest virtue.)

Sigh.

Indeed, there are many people who do not want to carry the heaviest load. But I don’t think that makes a difference here.

The ‘thou shalt’ of the camel is not necessarily coming from ‘the moral God’, as you’ve been using the phrase, as a slave morality. A slave morality can after all not transform into a master morality, since it is is ones nature. Rather, the camel holds the spirit of reverence. This can be reverence of anything great, of the world, in general. The camel still sees the value of the world as outside of himself, the metamorphoses are steps into internalizing the value. The phase of the lion is where the notion of value has been internalized, but the actual substance of the world has been rejected in order to make this step. The Child merges with the world as himself. He is reconciled with the fact that what he is isn’t the whole world, but that his greatest knowledge and highest value is in his total participation. This is against the pride of the lion, who rather holds back, who holds on to the pathos of distance to secure his pride.

the Child sees not difference between him and the world - his pride is not in his superiority over the world, his pride is like a sun, his pride is not in his roar, but shows only in the clarity and strength of his deeds.

Firstly, what makes you extend the notion of the dragon to a kind of internal demon of the lion? I can not find reason for this in what you quoted or highlighted. But, assuming that there is reason for this, to answer the question: because the spirit is overtaken by the spirit of lightness. The dragon just vanishes, if the spirit is fortunate (well-constituted) as its work is done. It is only a relatively ill-constituted spirit, which may account for the majority at the stage of the Lion, that holds on to the dragon, because the inner dragon, or inner demon, or forceful virtue, seems to the spirit to be the power of the spirit itself.

I don’t see that Nietzsche has replaced it - to me they are different passages, with different meanings.
The meaning may correlate in part, sure, and it is possible that what you quote here has sprung from the thought in the note. But the note is the topic, and I think it describes himself. Perhaps he ‘replaced’ (falsified) it later because he was fearful of what he saw.

Jacob

.
Well the first metamorphosis of the child/fool is the magician, here he has the first tools to utilise his creative potential [often the magician is shown next to a table with tools upon it]. I’d say that the creation aspect remains out of his hands ~ as shown by the metaphors of the camel and the lion, the lion thinks it finally has it within its clasp but is only an egoistic shadow of what occurs in the world card [where all the elements of creation are at his fingertips].
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Agreed.

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The child androgen is equally at the end of the tarot sequence, but the unnumbered card the fool/child is not the cycle and is only expressed through the cycles. I don’t know why Nietzsche uses the symbol of the child, the fool is an element within the child that carries through which for me is a better symbol. Presumably he is either thinking of the child as one would the fool, or he had some reason I am missing for using the child.
Naturally though the tarot belongs to an ancient set, perhaps Nietzsche wanted to get away from all the symbolism and bring such common themes down to fundamental symbols known to all. A kind of Occam’s occult!

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I would think the balance in the world card does not need moral enforcement any more than the innocence in the child. The sun is the lion yes, very much so [the sign of Leo]. Perhaps the burning rays of the sun eventually melts the ego of the lion, hence the lion eats itself? This somehow reminds me of Akhenaton and the Atun, eventually he and his religion of the sun [lion] destroys itself.

A high point, hmm yes. perhaps the world is Osiris painted with a green face [the green man], to me that is more like spring, the sewing of the seeds, and would put the sun at the harvest. Again the sun is reaping and the child on the horse is like someone showing the seeds of the harvest with all the often premature assurance that brings.
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In the footage she casually strolls along with lions around her, it is instantly recognisable that there is some manner of communication going on here. This is a common theme when you consider Hindu scene of Krishna sat with animals of the woods around him [even a tiger if I remember correctly], and I think there are similar Buddhist images. You threw me there at first saying it was concentration, but yes I suppose its like driving, there is a learned manner of concentrating without effort.
I like the unspoken conversation you had with the French people - cool when stuff like that happens.
.

Hmm maybe similar to Jesus’ intent to destroy himself [though I doubt if many would accept that lols], though here became manifest as eventual mental illness. If there was a physical medical condition, then I would expect that also to be a manifestation of this. This seams to be quite a general and familiar theme with thinkers and artists etc.
Somehow I think its all within the seed of their life that it unfolds to such an end, however there are always signs, that if read correctly the many facets of their unfolding lives, may find eventual flowering in the world. His wish to be superman was probably the very thing that blocked his eventual progress. …he set the end point at a premature juncture [the lion].

I knew this reaction was coming from you. I wish I could block specific reactions from “Sauwelios responding to analysis of Nietzsche-as-a-man”. But I can’t. So I have to ask: What exactly is wrong with the analysis?

Sauwelios

If I may…

The dragon judges the deed, though the perpetrator is not what the deed purports him to be {he remains the virtue but has the shadow of the deed within him}.

He changed it because the deed is the betrayal of the virtue. The deed is the works of the monster eventually subdued by the virtue. Though in Nietzsche’s case maybe he never arrived at this.

Generally, its that thing you’ve done that is not who you are, its what the world as the dragon imposes upon the soul.

It’s coming from a morality of good and evil sanctified by a God. At the very least it refers to the good of conforming to tradition and the evil of not doing so.

Where do you get all this?

There is in what I referred to, or in what I quoted referred to: WP 55 and the sections that belong to it (see Kaufmann’s footnote), GS 344, BGE 55, and TSZ “The Sublime Ones”:

[size=95]From the fight with wild beasts returned he home: but even yet a wild beast gazeth out of his seriousness—an unconquered wild beast!
[“The Sublime Ones”.][/size]

Part of “The Sublime Ones” seems to corroborate what you say here, in “spirit” at least:

[size=95]Also his hero-will hath he still to unlearn: an exalted one shall he be, and not only a sublime one:—the ether itself should raise him, the will-less one!
[ibid.][/size]
But further on in that speech, this seeming effortlessness is implied to be the outward expression of the supreme achievement:

[size=95][L]et thy goodness be thy last self-conquest.
[…]
The virtue of the pillar shalt thou strive after: more beautiful doth it ever become, and more graceful—but internally harder and more sustaining—the higher it riseth.
[ibid.][/size]
Those who achieve this, the “children”, are, to speak with my correction of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “those who restrain desire because their desire to do so is even stronger”, and who do so naturally:

[size=95]The enkrateia and askêsis is only a stage toward the heights: the “golden nature” is higher.
[WP 940. See also the rest of that section!][/size]
Compare:

[size=95]The most intellectual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in experiment; their delight is in self-subdual; in them asceticism becomes nature, necessity, instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush others… Knowledge—a form of asceticism.—
[AC 57, trans. Mencken, with my amendments.][/size]
The transition from lion to child is a transition from being truthful because one “shall” to being truthful because one “wills” to, for the sake of the pleasure of cruelty (toward oneself). Or at least that is half the story: namely insofar as the truth still does the opposite of enhancing the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in one.

But Nietzsche never published the passage you quoted, even though he had six years to do so.

That it’s based on a fragmentary and anachronistic reading of Nietzsche. I think you should read Lampert’s Nietzsche’s Teaching, which is a structural reading of TSZ, and then see if you still agree with your analysis.

What is the Leonic virtue that was spoken of as an obstacle to the spirit’s metamorphosis?
Is it not exactly the same as the “pride” against which the gospels advise the faithful (in many religious tradiitons)? The worldly pride, the noble pride of accomplishment and potency, military discipline- including that of the intellect, emotions, and physical body. All this is virtuous and good, but all this is still “Rajas”. The radiance of the perfected king of the jungle is splendid, but if the spirit further transforms within experience, and in a sense overcomes (throws away) this worthy attire of earthly “royalty” and the approval of powerful colleagues, may the spirit attain to incomparable “Sattva”. (Or perhaps be mangled by the many wheat-from-chaff cleansing perils and detours on the way) Would the carefull reader not agree, after all, that here the overcoming of Leonic virtue could well be understood as that typical experience of newborn saints, for whom their own percieved virtuousness and piousness becomes utterly unimportant, and they seem to delight in little mockeries pertaining to the state of human affairs in religion, which to most, are by definition blasphemous (unvirtuous) things… This said, there is, simultaneously, an “undercurrent from the the underworld” that’s very much detectable, and this Nietzschean “overcoming of virtue” is tinged with victim blood, and the characteristically demonic disdain for weaknesses like mercy, compassion, and having conscience. Such an intertwining is only paradoxical in seeming, and not in function, where the simultaneous upward lift and downward pull perform most harmoniously.

I’ve come to the conclusion that a practicable equals-sign between the three gunas - pillars of Indo-Aryan philosophy - is not only semantically appropriate but quite intentional (perhaps it appears courtesy of Schopenhauer’s oriental fascinations), to wit: Tamas, the guna of dimness (which also means “indifference”) portrayed by the most indifferent animal, the Camel, Rajas (Raja means “king”) by of course the Lion, and Sattva (loosely “purity”) by Child. But this is nothing new.

An excellent way to mis-construe this spiritual roadmap is by imagining that Camel is valuationally the lowest and Child the highest, and therefore that according to this illustrious plan, all must skip the troublesome Lion stage, as soon as possible begin to act childlike and pure, which would then finalize the spirit’s sequence of changes and allow one to rest upon laurels. Acting this way or that way has very little to do with the spirit’s changes, in the first place, as acting is the domain of persons(theatric masks), and not of spirits. Just as one may say that a map is not the territory, so too, the parable is not the reality that it hints at; and traversing much of the actual territory is inevitable, if the poetic metamorphosis is ever to occur.

-WL

quetzac -The concentration behind a perfected art always makes that art seem effortless.

I do not think that Nietzsche placed a premature junction, I think that his constitution put a limit to what he could attain. Of course, a person of his frail health could never be a superman, and I am sure he never had and illusions about this. His spirt has surely attained, sporadically, in the most lighthearted of his writing the form of the Child, but in general his oeuvre is very much that of a Lion, severe, proud, bound to a destiny, as full of hate as as of love.

Sauwelios - I cant help but laugh at your pridefulness, a correction of Blake! I must congratulate you on your lionesque virtue. But your truth is certainy not one that rings true to me. I find your explanations and corrections here hard to decipher and even harder to relate to, Talmudic rather than Nietzschean.

The notion that I would benefit from reading Lampert in my understanding of Nietzsche is, to me, absurd. I find his work dry of meaning. Nietzsches writing, on the contrary, contains too much meaning. Some meaning takes time and re-reading and sometimes discussing to get the meaning to manifest in full clarity, after it has been moving beneath the surface of a pregnant subconscious. “Where do you get all this?” Thought. I can see that we disagree on the nature of the Child. So be it. Both of us derive our notions form our different natures as much as from Nietzsche.

The meaning of the note has manifested to me over the course of some days. I do not share your approach to Nietzsches work as a repertoire that needs to be approached as a mathematical formula. I value rather the contrary aspect, the richness and diversity of meaning springing from his mind, like a forest full of wild fruits, an amount too rich and diverse to digest in its totality. None of these fruits could ever be corrected, even though some of them are poisonous.

If my interpretation is valid, and I am not so much convinced of this as perfectly clear on it (like I am not convinced, but perfectly clear on the fact that I like the taste of freshly picked wild and ripe blackberry, regardless of how it may taste to you), then it should be no mystery why Nietzsche chose not to publish it.

Weary Locomotive - I thank you for directing my focus to the necessity of the troublesome. A pleasure to read and rich food for meditation, as always.

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