Excerpts from chapter 11 in N. F. Gier, Spiritual Titanism: Indian, Chinese, and Western Perspectives (SUNY Press, 2000)
Daoism protests not so much against gods who transcend the world as against humans masquerading as gods.
–Ellen Chen1
There are two limiting cases, the child and the saint, where this pawning of one’s liberty . . . does not take place.
–Gabriel Marcel2
La vérité sort de la bouche des enfants et des fous.
(Truth comes out of the mouths of children and fools)
–Old French saying
Time spent laughing is time spent with the gods.
–Japanese proverb
INTRODUCTION
It should be an uncontroversial thesis that the wu wei of Daoism stands as the very opposite of the overassertive claims of spiritual Titanism. [A extreme humanism in which humans take on divine attributes.] Affirming the same integrated self as Zen Buddhism and Confucianism, Daoism rejects the dualism of matter and spirit one finds in Jainism and Samkhya-Yoga. We shall find, however, that, as opposed to the social self of Confucianism, Zhuangzi’s philosophy appears to join Yoga Titanism in affirming an antisocial self, which although living in the world, remains disengaged from it. On the other hand, Laozi’s Daoism expresses a distinct preference for the feminine, which, as we have seen in Sakta theology, offers a necessary corrective to typical male ideas of isolation and autonomy. We have observed that spiritual Titanism can be found not only in the deification of human beings, but also in the closely related claim of human immortality. Religious Daoism makes claims in the latter area and also transforms Laozi into a cosmic man, and the Zhuangzi also appears to deify the sage.
We now take an abrupt comparative leap to the “immortals” of Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf. (Actually, as a devoted Nietzschean Hesse’s place in this chapter is very appropriate.) At the beginning of the novel the protagonist Harry Haller is trapped in a dualistic wolf-man persona, which is gradually replaced with a view of the “onion” self, a thousand layered self that Hesse drew either from Eastern or Nietzschean sources (or both). Hesse’s immortals symbolize the free self-transformation that is possible if one embraces this idea of the soul. Harry encounters Goethe in a dream and he chides this immortal for taking himself so seriously and betraying the spirit of Romanticism. Harry contrasts Goethe to Mozart, who “did not make pretensions in his own life to the enduring and the orderly and to exalted dignity as you did. He did not think himself so important! He sang his divine melodies and died [young].”24 (The movie Amadeus portrays Mozart exactly in this way. He also had a maniacal laugh.) Goethe’s response is a veritable act of Daoist self-transformation: he changes into Mozart, then to Schubert, and the once stiff old figure begins to dance. (Hesse’s immortals also have a laughter that is, as Nietzsche once said, “no human laughter,” but a cosmic laughter that flows naturally from a recognition of the fluidity and absurdity of the universe.) Harry also learns how to dance and his teacher is a lovely creature of indeterminate sex–Hermine/Herman–who compels him to follow both the bliss and the chaos of his thousand selves.
The immortals of religious Daoism and Steppenwolf are definitely not Titans. They do not take on divine attributes or prerogatives; in fact, they would hold up to ridicule and howl with laughter at anyone who would. Third, Hesse’s allusions to the self returning to the Mother, the dualistic wolf-man self, and the onion self suggest a dialectical progression from premodern unity, through modern duality, to the fragmented self of postmodernism.
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra proclaims: “I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself. And behold, then this ghost fled from me.”76 Self-overcoming is of course self-transformation, and Zarathustra has carried to the mountains the ashes of the conventional self that he has destroyed. There he has fashioned a new self: “How could you want to become new without first becoming ashes.”77
One is reminded of Zarathustra’s missionary failures in the villages of the plain–they found him “wild and strange”–and his preference for his mountain cave and his animal friends, particularly the eagle and serpent, with whom he feels more safe than with humankind.
In one of Nietzsche’s most powerful parables–“The Vision and the Riddle”–we find Zarathustra walking a mountain path with a crippled dwarf riding on his shoulder. Our initial impression of the dwarf is a negative one: he is “the spirit of gravity” and he is Zarathustra’s “devil and archenemy.” He is “half dwarf, half mole, making lame, dripping lead into [Zarathustra’s] ear.”82 Earlier in the book Zarathustra says that his “devil” is a serious and solemn “spirit of gravity”; and this spirit is opposed to his dancing god and to his newly found power to fly. The spirit of gravity also “orders” that our children be taught self-loathing so that they then become camels of slave morality–loaded down with “too many alien grave words and values.”84 The person who has discovered herself says: “This is my good and evil,” but the “mole and dwarf,” representing the spirit of gravity, counters with moral universalism: “Good for all, evil for all.”85
Returning to “The Vision and the Riddle,” Zarathustra finally challenges the dwarf: “Stop, dwarf! It is I or you! But I am the stronger of us two: you do not know my abysmal thought. That you could not bear!”86 Zarathustra then presents the dwarf with a vision of eternal recurrence, but, curiously and surprisingly, the dwarf is not only able to bear this terrible truth but he also appears to know all about it and its implications. Speaking like a Daoist sage he declares: “All that is straight lies . . . All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle.”87 The rationalist prefers a “straight” idea of truth and a linear view of time.) In the Joyful Wisdom it is a demon who brings the news of eternal recurrence, but those strong enough to accept the message will declare: “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly.”89 Zarathustra’s devil-dwarf may have a more positive role to play than we first thought.
Earlier in the story the dwarf offers other sagely advise: “O Zarathustra. . . you philosopher’s stone! You threw yourself up high, but every stone that is thrown must fall.”90 Is it possible that Zarathustra by climbing too high and by presuming to fly needs to be reminded by this alter-ego dwarf of his own motto “Be true to the earth”? Commentators have identified several alter-egos in Zarathustra, so it is quite possible that the dwarf is yet another one of Zarathustra’s multiple selves. We should always remember that all overcoming is self-overcoming, and that even Overmen will have “overdragons” who are worthy of them.91 Zarathustra goes on to advise the higher men that they should not fear the devil, and that they should not be so obtuse as to call the Overman a devil, as surely the people of the plains will do.
Could it be that the dwarf is a symbol of Zarathustra’s most abysmal thought that he has always “carried”?92 After all, the motto “What goes up must come down” is simply the vertical version of “What goes around comes around.” Earlier in “The Way of the Creator” Zarathustra warned his “brothers” that “lusting for the heights” is “so many convulsions of the ambitious.”93 The dwarf’s point is confirmed in the section “The Spirit of Gravity,” which reminds us that even when humans learn to fly “the boundary stones themselves will fly up into the air before [them], and [they] will rebaptize the earth–‘the light one.'”94 Even those who fly should remain true to the earth; for all those who fly, Johnathan Livingston Seagull is a good example, will eventually have to make a landing.
“The Vision and the Riddle” ends with a shocking scene where Zarathustra comes upon a shepherd with a snake in his throat. The snake–“the heaviest and the blackest”–could symbolize the choking effects of the slave morality, and, as my students have suggested, the snake’s head, which Zarathustra exhorts the shepherd to bite off, could represent the Christian God himself. At the passionate urging of Zarathustra, the shepherd does decapitate the snake and is immediately transformed: “No longer shepherd, no longer human–one changed, radiant, laughing . . . a laughter that was no human laughter.”95 After the death of God, there is only eternal recurrence, and this “cosmic” laughter of Hesse’s immortals is the only proper emotional response to such a meaningless existence. As Graham Parkes says: “laughter [is] an often necessary concomitant of insight into the way things are.”96 Eternal recurrence is meaningless only in the sense of being nonteleological, not in the sense that humans cannot create meaning from it, as Nietzsche’s Übermensch and even Camus’ absurdist heroes must do.
Cosmic laughter is different from the laughter of the child who is the only being capable of loving herself and embracing every moment without any awareness of the terror of the inevitable return of many similar moments. Cosmic laughter is instead the “Olympian laughter” of the “deeply wounded,”97 those, like Nietzsche, who have suffered greatly, who know eternal recurrence as an “abysmal thought,” but who still realize that they must embrace it with a child’s acceptance. It is the laughter of the lion, who has come home to Zarathustra’s mountain retreat resigned to the futility of all his Nay-saying and protesting– in short, a reformed Titan.98 It is also the laughter of the Daoist sage or Zen master who says “Yes” to anything and everything in the universe, even though at its core it is a faceless hundun. (The hundun as belly; Nietzsche’s “belly of being speaks”;99 the mountain sages beat on their bellies; the belly laugh.) As the Daodejing says: “When the inferior person hears the Dao, he roars. If Dao were not laughed at, it would not be Dao.”100
Contrary to many Buddhists who claim that a true Buddha would never “laugh a great afflicted laugh, openly showing his grinning teeth,”101 the Tantric Buddhist would revel in such behavior. We are also reminded of the pagan gods who laughed themselves to death, both because the Christian God took himself so seriously and because the gods of course knew the truth of eternal recurrence all along.102 Finally, there is the Goddess and her laughter. There is the Gnostic Goddess Sophia, who ridicules Yahweh for being blind and selfish.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: LAOZI, ZHUANGZI, AND NIETZSCHE
1.. Ellen Chen, The Tao Te Ching: A New Translation and Commentary (New York: Paragon House, 1989), p. 41.
2.. Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, trans. James Collins (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 70.
24.. Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf, trans. Basil Creighton (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), p. 110. Nietzsche believes that Goethe was the Übermensch of the 18th Century: “A kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century. He bore its strongest instincts within himself. . . . What he wanted was totality; he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will. . . he disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself” (The Portable Nietzsche, p. 554).
76.. Ibid., p. 143.
77.. Ibid., p. 176.
82.. Ibid., p. 268. Zarathustra says: “I am the enemy of the spirit of gravity” (p. 304).
84.. Ibid., p. 305.
85.. Ibid., p. 306.
86.. Ibid., p. 269.
87.. Ibid., p. 270. In his mountain home at least having something riding on his back is seen in a postive light (p. 295).
89.. Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), vol. 10, §341, pp. 270-71.
90.. Ibid., p. 268.
91.. Ibid., p. 256.
92.. Ibid., p. 274.
93.. Ibid., p. 175.
94.. Ibid., p. 304.
95.. Ibid., p. 268.
96.. Parkes, “The Wandering Dance: Chuang Tzu and Zarathustra,” Philosophy East and West 33:3 (July, 1983), p. 236.
97.. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §1040.
98.. The Portable Nietzsche, p. 438.
99.. Ibid., p. 143.
100.. Daodejing, chap. 41 (Chen). Giving the inferior person this much credit goes against the usual interpretation of the first stanza of this chapter, but I am grateful to P. J. Ivanhoe for supporting me in this reading.
101.. Quoted in Griffiths, On Being Buddha, p. 73.
102.. The Portable Nietzsche, p. 294.