Nietzsche's "bon sauvage".

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“The satyr and the idyllic shepherd of later times have both been products of a desire for naturalness and simplicity. But how firmly the Greek shaped his wood sprite, and how self-consciously and mawkishly the modern dallies with his tender, fluting shepherd!”
[Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, chapter 8.]

Allan Bloom, in his “The Closing of the American Mind”, describes three distinct phases of the concept of the self:

“Fear of violent death and desire for comfortable self-preservation were the first stop on the way down. Everybody knows them, and we can recognize one another in them. The next stop was the sweet sentiment of existence, no longer immediately accessible to civilized man but recoverable by him. When under its spell, we can with certainty say to ourselves, “This is what I really am, what I live for,” with the further conviction that the same must be so for all other men. This, allied with a vague, generalized compassion, makes us a species and can give us guidance. At the next stop there turns out to be no stop, and the descent is breathtaking. If one finds anything at all, it is strictly one’s own, what Nietzsche calls one’s fatum, a stubborn, strong ass that has nothing to say for itself other than that it is. One finds, at best, oneself; and it is incommunicable and isolates each from all others, rather than uniting them. Only the rarest individuals find their own stopping point from which they can move the world. They are, literally, profound.”
[from the chapter “Values”.]

This last stage is also described by Harry Neumann:

“[S]cience is the simple realization that whatever is experienced - a self, a world, the law of contradiction, a god, or anything else - is nothing apart from its being experienced. When students complain of “identity crises,” I tell them not to worry, since neither they nor anyone else has an identity about which to have a crisis! For science, genuine knowledge of reality, reveals a world of nothing but empty experiences, impressions as Hume called them.”
[from the essay “Politics or Nothing!”]

Further on in the essay, Neumann quotes Karl Löwith:

“The spirit of national socialism was not so much concerned with the national and the social but much more with that radically private resoluteness which rejects any discussion or mutual understanding because it relies wholly and only on itself - At bottom all its concepts and words are the expression of the bitter and hard resoluteness of a will asserting itself in the face of its own nothingness, a will proud of its loathing for happiness, reason and compassion.”
[from “Der Okkasionelle Dezisionismus von C. Schmitt”.]

So much for the third and deepest stage of the concept of the self. Nietzsche does not stop at this nihilistic “truth”:

“One will see that in this book [The Birth of Tragedy] pessimism, or to speak more clearly, nihilism, counts as “truth.” But truth does not count as the supreme value, even less as the supreme power. […] [This book] teaches something that is stronger than pessimism, “more divine” than truth: art.”
[The Will to Power, section 853.]

It is my contention that Nietzsche moves, from the dead end of nihilism, “back” up to the second stage of the self. I will now explain how he does that.

The second stage, according to Bloom, “was the sweet sentiment of existence, no longer immediately accessible to civilized man but recoverable by him.” Elsewhere, he explains this in greater detail:

“But fear of death, however powerful it may be and however useful it may be as a motive for seeking peace and, hence, law with teeth in it, cannot be the fundamental experience. It presupposes an even more fundamental one: that life is good. The deepest experience is the pleasant experience of existence. The idle, savage man can enjoy that sentiment. The busy bourgeois cannot, with his hard work and his concern with dealing with others rather than being himself.”
[Bloom, ibid., from the chapter “Two Revolutions and Two States of Nature”.]

Note that this is not Bloom’s own perspective but his recapitulation of the ideas of Rousseau.

It is my contention that Nietzsche provides a solution for nihilism which consist of a complete revaluation of Rouseau’s bon sauvage (“good savage”). For Nietzsche, too, the positive experience of life is more fundamental than the negative experience of life:

“Pain is not the last word, therefore. Nietzsche does not say that there is more joy than pain; he says joy is prior and deeper.”
[George Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, page 310.]

Nietzschean joy, however, is to Rouseau’s "pleasant experience of existence as the satyr is to “the idyllic shepherd of modern man”: Nietzsche’s joy is Dionysian joy. Likewise, Nietzsche’s savage is not “good” as opposed to “evil”, but good beyond good and evil - good as opposed to bad. The three stages of the self Bloom describes correspond more or less to the three distinct types Neumann describes further on in his essay:

"Philosophy, as distinct from science, is the political effort to think through, to seriously question, the common goods responsible for rootedness in one’s herd. It is this rootedness’s compulsion which makes herd members believe that they have selves and inhabit a world which exists as more than empty reveries. In that political world, the main concern of all bestial or human herd members is obtaining and defending their common or political good.

"Unlike unphilosophic herd members, philosophers, that is philosophic herd members do not unquestioningly accept what their herd believes to be right and good. They transform their herd’s main concern, to live the good or pious life, into a question. They doubt their herd’s claim to answer this question, to know what is good for its members. However, in the decisive respect, philosophic herd members side with their unphilosophic brethren by embracing the illusion that their political good exists as something more than nihilistic reveries. Like all herd members, philosophers are shaped by what Nietzsche called the spirit of revenge.

“Unlike scientists knowledgeable about reality’s nihilism, philosophers never doubt the existence of a true moral-political good for their herd, however difficult or even impossible it may be to adequately ascertain this good. Since they obtain this fundamental certainty not by self-evident insight but by a political faith shared by all herd members, they remain philosophers, seekers after wisdom or knowledge. As such, they claim to know that their political good is the highest object of knowledge, although they do not know it adequately. In Socrates’ words, they know what they do not know. In any case, the illusion created by their herd membership precludes scientific realization of reality’s nihilism. They remain philosophers, not scientists; political men, not nihilists.”

Unphilosophic herd members are united by their “fear of violent death and desire for comfortable self-preservation”, as Bloom puts it, but are oblivious to the presupposition of these things, namely, “the pleasant sentiment of existence”. They just assume that life is worth living. Philosophic herd members, on the other hand, do not unquestioningly accept this good, but question it, want to understand it, want to know what it is, what society is based on or should be based on. However, they “side with their unphilosophic brethren” in their assumption that such a shared good exists. The end of philosophy, however, means that philosophy is merged in science. Nihilism is reached at this point, the awareness of the absence of a self, of identity. Nietzsche, however, though he has certainly reached this “point”, was yet not a scientist, but a philosopher (though not a “philosophic herd member”). Nietzsche’s “pleasant sentiment of existence” is based on scientific nihilism.

"My first solution: Dionysian wisdom. Joy in the destruction of the most noble and at the sight of progressive ruin: in reality joy in what is coming and lies in the future, which triumphs over existing things, however good. Dionysian: temporary identification with the principle of life (including the voluptuousness of the martyr).
[…]

  1. My endeavor to oppose decay and increasing weakness of personality. I sought a new center.
  2. Impossibility of this endeavor recognized.
  3. Thereupon I advanced further down the road of disintegration - where I found new sources of strength for individuals. We have to be destroyers! I perceived that the state of disintegration, in which individual natures can perfect themselves as never before - is an image and isolated example of existence in general. To the paralyzing sense of general disintegration and incompleteness I opposed the eternal recurrence."
    [The Will to Power, section 417.]

To be continued.

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We may regard Bloom’s three phases of the conception of the self as going from a commonality based on evil (violent death; also the man that may cause this, the “evil” man), through a commonality based on good (the pleasant experience of existence; also the man who may experience this, the “good” savage), to a lack of commonality, a lack of both good and evil. Nietzsche, however, emphasises that, for him, “beyond good and evil” does not mean “beyond good and bad”. I contend that Nietzsche goes up, from scientific nihilism, to an “artist’s metaphysics”, a new “good”, as opposed to “bad”, based on the emphasis on (Dionysian) joy; whereas, even farther “up”, there is not evil but bad: the emphasis on sorrow, on the unpleasant experience of existence. The latter constitutes decadence. The emphasis on joy, on the other hand, constitutes health, is a sign of health.

Art and the satyr are intimately related:

“The metaphysical solace” with which, I wish to say at once, all true tragedy sends us away - that, despite every phenomenal change life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful, was expressed most concretely in the chorus of satyrs, beings of nature who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement."
[Nietzsche, BT 7.]

“The outward, public expressions of artistic creation may vary from epoch to epoch, but the “physiological” preconditions of art remain constant.”
[Daniel Conway, Love’s labor’s lost.]

What connects the satyr with the artist is their psychology, which remains the same:

“If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: intoxication [Rausch].”
[Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Skirmishes, 8.]

This Rausch is also invoked above, where he speaks of “the voluptuousness of the martyr”;

“Art as the superior counterforce to all will to denial of life, as that which is anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, antinihilist par excellence.
[…]
Art as the redemption of the sufferer - as the way to states in which suffering is willed, transfigured, deified, where suffering is a form of great delight.”
[Nietzsche, The Will to Power, again section 853.]

Note Nietzsche’s use of the word “anti-Christian”. He planned on giving the sequel to his book “The Antichristian” (Der Antichrist) the title “The Misosopher”. Nietzsche interpreted the word “philosophy” as “love of truth”. So “misosophy”, for him, would be hatred of truth. This applies, I think, both to the so-called truth the philosophers were after (the absolute, Platonic truth) as well as to the scientific nihilist truth (the “ugly” truth, as Nietzsche repeatedly calls it).

But Nietzsche does not fly from the ugly truth. Rather, he transforms it into a positive force. He does not posit a new center, recognising that this cannot be found, that positing this would be a lie; rather, he transfigured “decay and increasing weakness of personality”:

“We have to be destroyers! I perceived that the state of disintegration, in which individual natures can perfect themselves as never before - is an image and isolated example of existence in general.”
[again The Will to Power, section 417.]

The satyr or Dionysian artist, too, is an image and isolated example of existence in general:

“[The] Dionysian artist [has] become wholly identified with the original Oneness, its pain and contradiction”.
[BT 5; see further the rest of this section.]

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Wow!!! Impressive.

=D>

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Yes? You actually find my quotefest impressive?

I was planning on writing a follow-up tonight. Stay tuned.

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I have already quoted from George Morgan’s What Nietzsche Means, page 310. On that same page, he says:

“Sorrow brings the morrow, but joy lives in the magic moment, which eternally returns: it reaches out beyond death to immortality.”

This reminds me of Savitri Devi’s ideas about the great man in time and the god Shiva. In her book The Lightning and the Sun, she presents three kinds of great men, which she symbolises by the three gods of the Hindu Trinity, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva (if we want to be really accurate, however, we should say “Brahma, Vishnu, and Rudra”). These three kinds of men, whose archetypes are these three gods, may be understood in the light of two qualities: “lightning” qualities and “sun” qualities. The “lightning” is, so to say, Dionysian, Titanic, destructive, etc. The “sun”, on the other hand, is Apollinian, beatific, peaceful, harmonic, etc.

The great man above time is wholly “sun”-like, whereas the great man in time is wholly “lightning”-like. We should see time here in the Heraclitean sense as constant strife, or in the Nietzschean sense as will to power, but in the light of Schopenhauer’s idea that the will is “evil” (selfish, etc.). The great man above time, as I have said before, is symbolised by Brahma:

“Brahma is existence in und fur sich - in and for itself; [B]eing unmanifested, and thereby outside and above time; [B]eing, beyond the conception of the time-bound mind, and thereby unknowable. It is significant that Brahma has no temples in India - or elsewhere. One cannot render a cult to that which no time-bound consciousness can conceive. One can, at the most, through the right attitude (and also through the right ascetic practices) merge one’s self into it; transcend individual consciousness; live above time - in the absolute present which admits no “before” and no “after,” and which is eternity.”

Note that this “Being” is repudiated by Nietzsche: there is no Being, only Becoming, no Beyond, but only this world and this life. As the word “ascetic” already suggests, this concept is life-negating. There is no other world to flee to; those who do so in the mind, however, who place themselves “above time” and thereby “above life”, are slanderers. The Apollinian Greeks, though, also had a concept of “above the world”, in their Olympian pantheon, but this was not slander, but art - a representation of real life, but glorified, deified, eternalised in their - immoral - gods. Yet this was no real solution for the suffering that life entails, the insight into the absurd and terrifying character of existence. The only real solution was to become (like) such a god…

I will not give an exegesis of Devi’s ideas here. I will rather present them in a correction, if I may be so bold.

Of the man in time, Devi says:

"All men, inasmuch as they are not liberated from the bondage of Time[,] follow the downward path of history, whether they know it or not, and whether they like it or not.

"Few indeed thoroughly like it, even at our epoch, - let alone in happier ages, when people read less and thought more. Few follow it unhesitatingly, without throwing, sometime or other, a sad glance towards the distant lost paradise into which they know, in their deeper consciousness, that they are never to enter; the paradise of Perfection in time - a thing so remote that the earliest people of whom we know remembered it only as a dream [and I contend that it is only a dream; unless…]. Yet, they follow the fatal way. They obey their destiny.

"That resigned submission to the terrible law of decay - that acceptation of the bondage of Time by creatures who dimly feel that they could be free from it, but who find it too hard to try to free themselves; who know beforehand that they would never succeed, even if they did try, is at the bottom of that incurable unhappiness of man, deplored again and again in the Greek tragedies, and long before these were written. Man is unhappy because he knows, because he feels - in general - that the world in which he lives and of which he is a part, is not what it should be, what it could be, what, in fact, it was at the dawn of Time, before decay set in and before violence became unavoidable. He cannot whole-heartedly accept that world as his — specially not accept the fact that it is going from bad to worse, and be glad. However much he may try to be a “realist” and snatch from destiny whatever he can, when he can, still an invincible yearning for the better remains at the bottom of his heart. He cannot - in general - will the world as it is [note that this was written by a woman].

“But few people are as rare as the liberated ones, for whom Time does not exist [the men “above time”], and perhaps rarer, can and do; and act up to that will. These are the most thorough, the most mercilessly effective agents of the Death-forces on earth: supremely intelligent, and sometimes extraordinarily farsighted; always unscrupulous to the utmost; working without hesitation and without remorse in the sense of the downward process of history and, (whether they can see or not as far as that) for its logical conclusion: the annihilation of man and of all life.”

Ah, what a flattering description! This great man in time follows his own selfish will to power:

"Since the Law of Time is what it is, and since the end must come, it is just as well that they should draw all the profit they possibly can from the process that is, anyhow, sooner or later, to bring about the end. Since no one can re-create the primeaval lost Paradise - no one but the wheel of Time itself, after it has rolled its full course - then it is just as well that they, who can completely forget the distant vision, or who never had a glimpse of its dying glow; they, who can stifle in themselves the age-old yearning for Perfection, or rather, who never experienced it; it is just as well that they, I say, should squeeze out of the fleeing moment (whether minutes or years, it matters little) all the intense, immediate enjoyment they can, until the hour copses when they must die. It is just as well that they should leave their stamp upon the world - force generations to remember them, until the hour comes for the world to die. So they feel. It makes little difference what suffering they might cause to men or other living creatures, by acting as they do. Both men and creatures are bound to suffer, anyhow. Just as well through them as through others, if that can forward the aims of these people.

"The aims of these people - of the men within Time, par excellence, are always selfish aims, even when, owing to their material magnitude and historical importance, they transcend immeasurably any one man’s life, as they actually do, sometimes. For selfishness, the claim of the “part” to more place and to more meaning than is naturally allotted to it within the whole, is the very root of disintegration, and therefore a characteristic inseparable from Time. One can practically say that, more a person is thoroughly, remorselessly selfish, more he or she lives “in Time.”

Those evil men within time! It is these who are symbolised by the god Shiva, who is really the stormgod Rudra who has symbolically incorporated the pure (interdictory) pole of Brahma, which is symbolised by Mitra.

“[Shiva] is - as essence of destructive change, as time - turned toward the future. And, on the other hand, Lord Shiva himself - time personified - is also (strange as this may seem to the purely analytical mind) above time. He is the great Yogi, whose face remains as serene as the blue sky while his feet beat the furious rhythm of the Tandava dance, amid the flames and smoke of a crumbling world.”

I think the great man in time need not be oblivious to “perfection in time”, but rather achieves it as follows:

“Happiness at Becoming is only possible in the annihilation of the real, of “existence”, of beautiful appearance, in the pessimistic shattering of illusion: - in the annihilation of even the most beautiful appearance does Dionysian happiness attain its high point.”
[Nietzsche, Nachlass, my translation.]

Pleasure in destruction, happiness at Becoming - these are intensely Shivan, more precisely, Bhairavan. I associate Shiva’s terrible forms as Bhairava and Mahakala (“Great Time”, to whom Devi refers) with the satyr. I think the common ground they share is shamanism. Shamanism is a way of being in harmony with nature, part of nature, one with nature, not just in the hippie sense but also in the more robust sense as being as “cruel”, as indifferent, to mother nature’s children as she herself is. She is Mahakali, the bloodthirsty goddess, who may eat her own children when she feels like it.

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Wow, nice!!! =D> =D> =D> =D> =D>

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"The second stage, according to Bloom, “was the sweet sentiment of existence, no longer immediately accessible to civilized man but recoverable by him.” Elsewhere, he explains this in greater detail:

“But fear of death, however powerful it may be and however useful it may be as a motive for seeking peace and, hence, law with teeth in it, cannot be the fundamental experience. It presupposes an even more fundamental one: that life is good. The deepest experience is the pleasant experience of existence. The idle, savage man can enjoy that sentiment. The busy bourgeois cannot, with his hard work and his concern with dealing with others rather than being himself.”
[Bloom, ibid., from the chapter “Two Revolutions and Two States of Nature”.]

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What ascetic practices would those be?

Sought how?

Impossibility why?

Through what process did this perception of ‘destroyer’ arise?

Denial of life. Right.

Perhaps it’s a good time to point out that Nietzsche, whist better informed on eastern philosophy than most of his western counterparts, was still ignorant of fundamental aspects of Buddhist doctrine. As a result, there are a couple of serious limitations in his reasoning. The problem was that existing translations of the sutras available to him were woefully limited and inadequate. As well, there were very few westerners in the 19th century that had studied Buddhist philosophy at any depth (at Nietzsche’s time, any serious study had barely started), and those who did were often limited by their grounding in western philosophical approaches that were based on assuming that reality is ‘captured’ through conceptual means. The roots of deconstruction are in eastern philosophy, which makes explicit the limitations of language and how this implies more to experience than can be realized through conceptual thinking.

Because of his aphoristic style, it’s wonderfully challenging to deconstruct Nietzsche. When I’ve tried, I’ve found only the two serious flaws in his reasoning, both of which I’m reminded of by reading the OPs The first is that it’s still ‘reasoning’, there’s no corresponding praxis, no “Practical Strategy for Ripping Away One’s Lower Being” to get that wide-angle view of the abyss. This isn’t his fault; it’s his inheritance from the West, traceable back to the Greeks. His gift (perhaps his inspirational madness) was his rage at humans’ attraction to the collective and inability to transcend the animal. This motivated the recognition of the need to tear into the individual to find and destroy his lower being, socially-influenced herd mentality. But how does one actually develop the will to power? What does one do? Think harder and deeper until ones has cogitated oneself into the realization of yet another (albeit not heretofore thought of) thought? Is this then the transcendent thought?

There’s this glaring omission, IMO, this ‘philosophy’ presented as a product of abstract thought, thinking, scholarly analysis; it’s still ‘dead’ in a sense. Even Nietzsche, who was vibrantly alive as a thinker; even in his brilliance, he was unable to conceive of a state beyond the categories of being and non-being. So he concluded that, after dissolution of the will, the Buddha entered into a final state of complete non-existence. A surrender into non-existence through extinguishing the will. Nirvana, however, cannot be described as existing, not existing, both existing and not, or neither existing nor not. It’s not ‘nothingness’, because even nothingness is constituted by the relative contingencies that are dependently arisen as ‘samsara’, or conditioned existence.

Thus the second flaw…he viewed Nirvana as a nihilism, erroneously interpreting the common expression of emptiness as a negation when, in fact, Nirvana transcends the difference between the four sets of categories given above (being, non-being, both, and neither). It’s therefore incorrect to point to Nirvana as nothingness, and just as inaccurate to conclude that it must be something. Nirvana is pointed to as beyond the realm of reason and language; empty of inherent ‘Nirvana-ness.’

As often is the case when it comes to interpreting a concept (although not always), understanding shunyata requires direct experience of it by taking some action beyond merely thinking about it. Yet strangely, Nietzsche viewed Buddhism as a form of non-action as the means of escaping suffering. This non-action then giving rise to passing into absolute non-existence. The Buddha taught citta-bhavana, or mind training. In this approach, mind is not only what examines the world, but also is examined itself, how it works and what emerges from it. Mind is about its own state, brought about by its conditioning.

Nietzsche’s obviously concerned with the production of the Ãœbermensch, but limited in explaining clearly how one progresses to it. He gives us the vivid picture of the patient and the malady, an equally impressive and vibrant picture of the patient restored to health…but precious little on the technique of the cure.

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I think she is referring to the various types of Yoga and the like.

By ticking off the possibilities - reasoning what is left. When the idea of a “soul” (in the Christian-Platonic sense) has been dismissed, what is left is the body:

Because the body is only relatively durable and relatively a unity. No such an absolute center as the “soul” was supposed to be is to be found.

To what does the phrase “this perception of ‘destroyer’” (a very sloppy expression if you ask me) refer?

If you mean the perception “that the state of disintegration […] is an image and isolated example of existence in general”, I should answer: the scientific process. The scientific term for this disintegration is “entropy”.

“To end suffering, one must cut off greed and ignorance. This means changing one’s views and living in a more natural and peaceful way. It is like blowing out a candle [nirvana means “extinction”…]. The flame of suffering is put out for good. Buddhists call the state in which all suffering is ended Nirvana. Nirvana is an everlasting state of great joy and peace. The Buddha said, “The extinction of desire is Nirvana.” This is the ultimate goal in Buddhism. Everyone can realize it with the help of the Buddha’s teachings. It can be experienced in this very life.”
online.sfsu.edu/~rone/Buddhism/footsteps.htm

And there you have your ascetic practices.

The Buddhist (in the narrow sense as “follower of the teachings of Siddharta Gautama”, at least) wants to end suffering; the Dionysian/Nietzschean wants to affirm suffering:

“Art as the redemption of the sufferer - as the way to states in which suffering is willed, transfigured, deified, where suffering is a form of great delight.”

Tragedy is a form of this art. Nietzsche describes the essence of the tragic experience as follows:

“[T]o be oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity - that joy which also includes the joy in destroying…”
[Twilight, Ancients, 5.]

Compare this to:

“We have to be destroyers! I perceived that the state of disintegration, in which individual natures can perfect themselves as never before - is an image and isolated example of existence in general.”

Now I am aware that Buddhism has connections with Shamanism, most notably in Tibet. This tragic Dionysian wisdom of Nietzsche’s is essentially shamanic. The “wrathful deities” of Vajrayana Buddhism are essentially shamans - not Buddhas. These “deities” are often misunderstood as follows:

“The crucial phenomenon underlying their appearance is this: wrathful deities adopt the forms of what they are engaged in destroying.”
[Rob Linrothe, “Protection, Benefaction, and Transformation: Wrathful Deities in Himalayan Art”.]

Compare this to Nietzsche’s criticism of Aristotle:

“Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems, the will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility even in the very sacrifice of its highest types - that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to get rid of terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge - Aristotle understood it that way - but in order to be oneself the eternal joy” etc.
[Nietzsche, ibid.]

*Compare this to:

“Joy in the destruction of the most noble and at the sight of progressive ruin: in reality joy in what is coming and lies in the future, which triumphs over existing things, however good.”

Cf. my signature.

??

Nietzsche did not want to “transcend the animal”; to the contrary: he scorned and indeed condemned attempts at such supposed “transcendence”…

“In the beginning, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their predominance did not lie mainly in physical strength but in strength of the soul - they were more whole human beings (which also means, at every level, “more whole beasts”).”
[Beyond Good and Evil, section 257.]

“The strength and power of the senses - this is the essential thing in a well-constituted and complete man: the splendid “animal” must be given first - what could all “humanization” matter otherwise!”
[The Will to Power, section 1045.]

“They despised the body: they left it out of the account: more, they treated it as an enemy. It was their delusion to believe that one could carry a “beautiful soul” about in a cadaverous abortion-- To make this conceivable to others they needed to present the concept “beautiful soul” in a different way, to revalue the natural value, until at last a pale, sickly, idiotically fanatical creature was thought to be perfection, “angelic,” transfiguration, higher man.”
[ibid., section 226, entire.]

“In such a state [as man attains in the highest cultures, the Greek, for example] it is precisely the [moral] good that needs “justifying,” i.e., it must be founded in evil and danger or involve some great stupidity: then it still pleases. Animality no longer arouses horror; esprit and happy exuberance in favor of the animal in man is in such ages the most triumphant form of spirituality. Man is now strong enough to be ashamed of any faith in God: he may now play the advocatus diaboli. If he in praxi advocates the preservation of virtue, he does it for reasons that recognize in virtue a subtlety, a cunning, a form of lust for gain and power.
This pessimism of strength also ends in a theodicy, i.e., in an absolute affirmation of the world - but for the very reasons that formerly led one to deny it [suffering, for instance…] - and in this fashion to a conception of this world as the actually-achieved highest possible ideal.”
[ibid., section 1019.]

And perhaps, the latter also applies to the animal in man? Perhaps the human animal is the highest possible ideal of “the human”?

“One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory”.
[Genealogy I.11]

Ah, when this is actually achieved…

“The problem I thus pose is not what shall succeed mankind in the sequence of living beings (“man is an end”): but what type of man shall be bred, shall be willed, for being higher in value, worthier of life, more certain of a future.
Even in the past this higher type has appeared often: but as a fortunate accident, as an exception, never as something willed. In fact, it has been the type most dreaded, almost the dreadful - and from dread the opposite type was willed, bred, and attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick human animal - the Christian…”
[The Antichristian, section 3.]

And Nietzsche emphasises:

“[S]uccess in individual cases is constantly encountered in the most widely different places and cultures; here we really do find a higher type: which is, in relation to mankind as a whole, a kind of overman [Ubermensch]. Such fortunate accidents of great success have always been possible and will perhaps always be possible. And even whole families, tribes, or peoples may occasionally represent such a bull’s-eye.”
[ibid., section 4.]

Sparta was such a bull’s-eye.

Not non-existence: non-suffering…

Blah, blah. “Nirvana” is just a mental state - and perhaps a pathological state.

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Buddha did not seek to eliminate suffering. He sought to eliminate the fear of suffering, which is the root of much unnecessary suffering. That is Buddhism in a nutshell.

“Only those who attach their hearts to an exemplary figure may enter the circle of culture.”

In your case, Nietzsche, I assume?
Jesus in most cases. I have yet to find an example.