I want to compare some fragments of Heraclitus to some major ideas of Nietzsche.
The first fragment I want to dive into is related to my current signature. My current signature is:
“What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a bitter shame. And just that shall man be to the Overman: a laughing-stock or a bitter shame.”
[Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Zarathustra’s Prologue, 3.]
The fragment in question reads:
“The handsomest ape is ugly compared with humankind; the wisest man appears as an ape when compared with a god - in wisdom, in beauty, and in all other ways.”
So Nietzsche’s Overman corresponds to Heraclitus’ god. Note that this is “god” without a capital: there are many of these “gods” (polytheism).
The second fragment I want to look into sheds light on why the god is wiser than the man:
“For god all things are fair and just, but men have taken some things as unjust, others as just.”
This corresponds exactly to Nietzsche’s amor fati, love of fate:
“Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathesome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole -he does not negate anymore… Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus.”
[Twilight of the Idols, Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, section 49.]
Crowley says the same in his own way in his Little Essay toward Truth on Sorrow:
And the universe is the body of God, the mindless God, Dionysus.
Gilles Deleuze has said what Crowley says in that quote from The Book of the Law (“Remember … remains.”) in his own words:
“Only affirmation returns, only that which can be affirmed returns, only joy returns.”
[Deleuze, Nietzsche.]
This is a reference to Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Eternal Return. Negation does not return because there is no cumulative consciousness of displeasure, whereas power is eternal joy.
The next fragment is related to the Eternal Return:
“This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be - an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.”
It only does not say that this fire will burn in exactly the same way again and again. But;
“In the circumference of the circle the beginning and the end are common.”
The next fragment deals with life and death:
“Immortals mortal, mortals immortal: the former live the death of the latter, the latter are dead in regard to the life of the former.”
This fragment may be explained in several ways.
The former may “live the death of the latter” in the sense that what constitutes life and liveliness to the former would be deadly for the latter; this concerns the “poison” Dunamis mentioned in the Your Favorite Nietzche [sic] Quote thread.
It can also be said that the life of the “gods”, of these Overmen, causes death and destruction among the mere men:
“War is father and king of all; and some he has shown as gods, others men; some he has made slaves, others free.”
May we not identify the free with the “gods” and the slaves with the men, in the light of Nietzsche’s statement from Twilight of the Idols above?
The “gods” bring death and destruction to the men below:
“The initial Aryan onslaught began with the First Aryan invasion under Indra. The barbaric Vedic Aryan hordes swept down into the Indus Valley civilization, attacking the peace-loving and tolerant Semito-Negroid civilization. Unaccustomed to such violence and blood-shed, and unable to withstand the sheer numbers of ferocious invaders, the civilization collapsed into massacres, mayhem and disorder. Following this calamity, India was plunged into 1000 years of darkness, a period referred to as the Vedic Dark Ages. Virtually the entire native populations of Negroids, Semites and Mongoloids were exterminated. The Indus irrigation system was shattered to permanently destroy agriculture in the region in the first recorded instance of ecological warfare.”
[The Bible of Aryan Invasions, Vol. II]
Note that anyone who questions the Aryan Invasion theory is thereby a Holocaust denier.
There is another explanation for the last fragment of Heraclitus I quoted. As I wrote on another philosophy forum;
“The higher men Nietzsche admires are like lone predators, or at most packs of such predators - the opposite of the flock of “sheep”. […] The deepest need of “sheep”, their will to “freedom”, their True Will, their will to power is to dissolve into the Herd, that is, to dissolve their individual souls into the Group Soul, their weak individual wills into the Herd Will”.
So “the latter are dead in regard to the life of the former” may mean that the latter die an individual death in dissolving into the herd, into the mental slumber that the herd’s security makes possible and that membership of it demands.
“Death is all we see awake; all we see asleep is sleep.”
[Heraclitus.]
“Solitude probes most thoroughly, more than any illness proper, whether one is born and predestined for life - or for death, like by far the most.”
[Nietzsche, Nachlass.]