On Saints and Satyrs: Why It's Preferable to Have Horns than a Halo

St. Anthony encountering a satyr 

Fresco from the Skete of St. Demetrios, 

the Holy Monastery of Vatopedi, 

Mount Athos, Greece  

I.

Nietzsche cheerfully claims in the Preface to Ecce Homo that he's the very opposite in nature to the kind of individual who has traditionally been regarded as virtuous and that he prides himself on this fact: I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus and I would rather be a satyr than a saint.

He doesn't aim for the moral improvement of humanity or long to see men and women with halos. On the contrary, he'd rather individuals grew horns and found their best strength in the evil that exists as a potency within us (and also a power outside us) over which we have no final control; a potency often thought of in terms of either animality or the daimonic.

Let me expand upon these ideas before, in part two of this post, Dr. Símón Solomon explains why it is that the figure of the saint never quite departs from Nietzsche's text and why his relationship with the holy fool is often ambiguous and perplexing.

II. 

Zarathustra famously says that man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him.

Of course, evil isn't being used here as a moral term. Rather, it refers to a healthy expression of will to power, or what Freud (negatively) terms man's primary hostility - i.e., that which is permeated with a death drive and perpetually threatening chaos and destruction if not mediated by the power of Love.

Nietzsche, however, feels it is Love - or moral idealism - that, in its attempt to negate difference and becoming, is fundamentally nihilistic. He argues that the restrictions placed on man's instinctual life and the frustration of his most active forces ultimately has the effect of weakening him and ensuring the becoming-reactive of these forces.

Marcuse calls this the fatal dialectic of civilization and D. H. Lawrence notes: "We think love and benevolence will cure anything. Where as love and benevolence are our poison." Of course, it's true that man has been made into an interesting animal via this moral poisoning - Nietzsche readily admits this - but so too he has been made sick and full of self-loathing.    

Ultimately, what I'm suggesting here is that if man were allowed to develop a pair of horns, then he'd be stronger and happier - if a little bone-headed - and, as a consequence, superior to the righteous but resentful creature he is today.

Those who wish for men to be saints and have halos above their heads, subscribe to a model of light-headed humanism that, in restricting the desire for power, has created an unhappy species of herd animal that is, to paraphrase Nick Land, sordid, passive, and cowardly.  

Notes

Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1988).

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Penguin Books, 1976), p. 330.

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, (Beacon Press, 1955). 

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 114.


For a sister post to this one by Símón Solomon, click here.

Revenge of the Flowers

  The triumph of vegetation is total

The revenge of the flowers is an idea that has long fascinated me. I like the thought that plant life continuously conspires to challenge the supposed superiority of animals and defeat attempts on behalf of humanity to create a full idealized and mechanized world; that one day, the weed will conquer.

It is certainly worth remembering that not only do plants have ancestral reality, but we remain absolutely dependent upon them to provide the air we breathe and the food we eat. Man might dream of one day paving over the entire world with concrete and tarmac, but it's grass - that most unassuming of all plants - that provides the foundation for our continued survival and success.

Indeed, once we abandon our anthropocentric conceit, it becomes arguable that not only is our life dependent upon plants, but is in a very real sense determined by them. Like the birds and the bees and other insects, we exist - as far as the plants are concerned - to disseminate their DNA. At best, we have entered into a mutually beneficial co-evolutionary relationship with flora which renders conventional and convenient distinctions between subject and object meaningless: we shape their unfolding and they shape ours.

If you're a humanist, this is a little disconcerting and hard to admit. For it means acknowledging the fact that plants are just as complex, just as cruel, and just as exploitative as us and that in comparison to the daisy, the greatest monuments of mankind are transitory and insignificant. Plants have been evolving for millions of years and have in that time been endlessly inventing new strategies for survival and perfecting their designs. Thus, to say that we are a more advanced form of life is more than a little presumptuous. We can walk and talk and think, but, in the absence of chlorophyll, we can't photosynthesize nutrients directly from water, soil, and sunlight.

All this being said, it's surely important not to simply fall back into one of the three traditional narratives about man and nature with which we are all too familiar: (i) the heroic narrative, in which humanity is depicted as struggling against nature; (ii) the romantic narrative, in which paradise is regained and man emerges into some kind of spiritual unity with nature; (iii) the eco-apocalyptic narrative, characterized by Michael Pollan as an "environmental morality tale, in which Nature pays man back for his transgressions".

Contrary to these tired mythological storylines, I propose a speculative and realist narrative in which all forms of flora and fauna are regarded primarily as objects - not necessarily equal objects, but equally objects nevertheless, caught up in the same orgy of sex, violence, and random mutation that we like to call life.