I didn’t wonder whether you were that person (I know you’re about my age), I asked you—rhetorically, hopefully—if she was a ‘you-person’ (analogous to your fantastical coinage “you-word”)…
The horror is not in having an admirer, nor even in getting weird gifts from that admirer, but in the insanity of the admirer… More precisely, in having their insanity cause you (an open-minded, second-guessing person like me) to question your own sanity, if even for a moment. Do you know the horror of feeling you’re going insane?
Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 8:14 PM
Is not your god mad because he hath been created by madmen?
In this sense your mad god is nothing but a madman’s mistake.
Oh no, to the contrary: he is a sane man’s deliberate illusion, that
is, a lie. My God is a holy lie, and I am its priest.I will tell you the story of how it happened - how and why this
illusion was first created. It all began when I had defined the
Overman as the man who wills the eternal recurrence. To will: that
means, to determine that it is so, that it shall be so.
The “truth” willed is then a firm perswasion, to speak with Blake. It
is a conviction of which a great spirit, a skeptic, avails itself,
but a conviction nonetheless.Being convinced of the eternal recurrence, I became a circulus
vitiosus deus, as Nietzsche describes in Beyond Good and Evil,
section 56. Thus the world, the whole circular cosmic process,
existed only in order to attain me, or rather that magic moment of
complete affirmation and Dionysian joy. But I went even farther: I
went back to the most basic philosophical question, the question as
to the reality of perception. Were my perceptions really that, i.e.,
reflections of things perceived (to which they were as appearances
are to things in themselves, to Platonic ideas)? Did my subjective
sensations reflect an objective reality? Or were my sensations, my
perceptions, really hallucinations - not even illusions, not
distorted images, but completely dreamed up, merely imagined, things?
Was my consciousness perhaps the only actuality? No one and nothing
can convince me that he, she, or it does really exist apart from me,
that he or she is a person, like myself, with a consciousness, like
myself, or that it is a real object, like my body - in fact my body
itself is only such a supposed object, which might not exist at all
outside of my mind - even my brain, the stuff my mind is supposed to
be made of may be a mere hallucination… This idea is explored by
Jung and Serrano in NOS (see the section titled ‘Self’ [in the chapter “Another Turn of the Wheel”]):http://feastofhateandfear.com/archives/serrano2.html
Having convinced myself of this - that everything, the whole ring of
recurrence, existed only within my mind, was only a part of me -, I
was, in effect, God. I had fulfilled the wish expressed by Plato in
his Theages:“Each one of us would like to be master over all men, if possible,
and best of all God.”
(As quoted by Nietzsche in The Will to Power, section 958.)What joy! But it was bound to be shortlived.
I then realised that, being all, I was absolutely alone. This is
not to be taken lightly, i.e., popularly, as in “absolutely
fantastic” and the like. I mean absolute as opposed to relative. The
solitude we Nietzscheans, if we are truly that, cherish, like the
master himself, is relative solitude: (relative) distance from other
human beings. It is the polar opposite of herd mentality, the desire
to be close to other human beings. As I wrote on a Philosophy Forum
last year;"Relative solitude is a boon for me: distance, the feeling of
distance - you know how Nietzsche glorifies these. But this new
absolute solitude was something completely different. It was the
absolute absence of distance. It is a fact that people of all
religions idealise “Union with God”, which to them seems the ultimate
achievement. It is Nirvana, becoming one with the All, dissolving
into the All. It is the metaphysical counterpart of being a part of
the Herd, becoming one with the Herd, dissolving into the Herd. This
is the opposite of relative solitude. 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, which is strong because of the sheer number of
weak wills it is the sum of. Such sheep experience the greatest
feeling of power - the greatest “happiness”, to speak moralistically -
in “altruism”, that is, in working for the Herd."For me, however - a Noble Wolf whose happiness consists in the
feeling of distance from the Herd, my feeling of superiority, my
freedom from the Herd -, to be dissolved into the Herd - into “God” -
is the greatest curse, which generates the feeling of the greatest
absence of power.1 It was like going mad, losing consciousness,
losing my “soul”, my individuality. It had to be prevented. For some
time I endured being a mere man once more, a heroic man, to be sure
(for up to that thought experiment I had been a demigod…), until
the solution struck me like lightning - “the redeeming lightning”, as
Zarathustra calls it. For I reasoned thus: God is All, therefore he
is absolutely alone. Absolute solitude signifies the loss of
consciousness (as consciousness is engendered by opposition, by
relation/relativity), which amounts to madness, the loss of all
reason. Thus one who realises he is God shall go mad, if this
awareness cannot be prevented. Nothing is as horrible as that,
therefore everything is permitted. Even suicide. When one feels one
is going mad, desperation instinctively divines the need for suicide.
Sanity, the will to sanity, the self-preservation of consciousness
demands it.“Problem: God cannot die. He is immortal. Therefore, one who realises
he is God cannot prevent his oncoming madness, therefore - he shall
go mad. This put into my mind the means for a return to demigodhood,
which was most needful. I don’t know how much longer I might have
endured mere manhood - how long it would have been before the hero
would have collapsed. I was like Atlas carrying the heaviest burden,
the absence of God. Then I realised: God exists! He is mad! This
insight beamed at me like a shining sun, and I smiled back at it.”Thus I came to regard the cosmic process as the raging of a mad God:
a God who had not merely lost his mind, but never had one in the
first place. But see the article titled “I think God is insane (no,
really)” in the Links section.I now stand before the unspeakable task of pursuing all the possible
interpretations of this thought: for instance, whether it is possible
that there are, indeed, beings like me (which is my instinctive
conviction: the conviction that you, Moody, exist apart from my image
of you) - beings who might have similar thoughts themselves. It is a
task before which I have halted: I have sat down before my great lie,
before my mad God, in beatific contemplation of Him, savouring this
blissful vision, adoring the appearance, not wanting to know - the
Truth.
The horror of feeling you’re going insane is the horror of feeling you’re about to lose your reason, as the faculty in virtue of which one can distinguish between freedom and the mere feeling of freedom (which latter a madperson may very well have)… Or at least that’s what it is for someone like me. For someone like you, on the other hand,—a woman and thereby (almost) necessarily a herdperson—the feeling of being alone, without a benevolent, never-forgetting, most powerful being around you or on your phone or laptop to chat with…
