THE INTEGRAL NIETZSCHE
The integral thinker Layman Pascal has shown great enthusiasm for Nietzsche’s philosophy. Pascal, who identifies with the metamodernist stream, sees Nietzsche as an important forerunner of the spiritually oriented thinkers who believe we are gradually entering a new age. Our thinking will no longer be dominated by the closed scientific materialist and rationalist philosophies that have restricted human development, and Nietzsche, by smashing the idols of our modern age, freed our imaginations and opened new horizons.
Pascal’s celebration of Nietzsche is surprising at first glance since Nietzsche has usually been viewed as a formidable opponent of religion and morality. He seems an unlikely ancestor of today’s spiritual revival in light of his links with nationalism, fascist thought, and militant atheism. In addition, his emphasis on power as the basic human drive, attacks on conventional notions of truth, deconstructive approach, and tearing down of idols mark him as an important precursor of postmodern thinkers not noted for their spiritual affinities.
Nietzsche has gained more attention as an archenemy of cultural decadence than as a creator of new values and antidotes to nihilism. There is an even more glaring contrast: integral thought presupposes fundamental human equality, a notion that Nietzsche scorned. For him, history’s only purpose is to develop exceptional beings, the leading edge of human evolution, a stance that is far more elitist than democratic.
A split among Nietzsche’s interpreters was already evident in Germany during the 1930s when his thought was used by the National Socialist Party to add gravity and substance to its meager cultural philosophy. The divergence of opinion has been described as the wild Nietzscheans versus the gentle ones or Nietzsche, the far-right ideologue, as opposed to the apolitical visionary. His rightwing enthusiasts see him as licensing destructive human impulses in order to cleanse the world of all that is weak and cowardly and deserves to perish, whereas his literary and artistic admirers believe he upholds the path of sublimation and self-overcoming, justifying life in aesthetic terms. In its most up-to-date version, this debate takes the form of Nietzsche, the antimodernist and nationalist of aristocratic sentiments, versus the spiritual Nietzsche, a rich source of wisdom for this metamodern age.
The Case for a Metamodern Nietzsche
Layman Pascal celebrates the complexities and richness of Nietzsche’s work, calling him an integral philosopher ahead of his time. In Pascal’s view, Nietzsche’s pioneering insights on self-development and his profound introspection take us far beyond the limits of modernity and its regressive nationalism. Not only does he diagnose the contemporary challenge of nihilism, he prescribes a new morality that allows us to overcome the Judeo-Christian values that have held humans back from realizing their creative potential.
In place of the stagnant and devitalizing values of our time, he proposes a strenuous spiritual ethic based on liberating and harmonizing vital energies and power. His path requires high risks and bold action and encourages the creation of great artistic works. In this regard, Pascal thinks that Nietzsche has much to offer integral thought, since he envisions what lies beyond nihilism on the far side of modern life. His prophetic thought inspires us to let go of the cultural values that have held back human evolution in our time.
In concrete terms, Pascal sees Nietzsche as successfully addressing some of the major crises of our modern age. As in Nietzsche’s time, we lack the value foundation that would allow us to use our powerful modern technology wisely so that it serves our organic and multidimensional needs. Instead, we are dominated by the technocratic priesthood, who exploit our lower impulses for power. Pascal applauds Nietzsche’s recognition that the use of power is the key issue we must confront.
Nietzsche, in Pascal’s view, understands that the maximization of power requires the emergence of the ultrahuman, in whom the creative spirit is embodied. To achieve this higher purpose, we must let go of the shibboleths of our time: unlimited economic growth, history as linear progress, the idea that reason and science are the culmination of human development. Instead, to facilitate the birth of the ultrahuman, we need to ground ourselves in the body and the earth, reviving the Dionysian spirit. The avatars of this future are the philosophical visionaries and experimental artists who bring forth radically new forms and images, anchored in our deepest roots while reaching toward the heavens.
Pascal distinguishes between the paths of greater complexity and empowerment on the one hand and fascist regression on the other. Nietzsche sees value as the coherence of all our impulses that want more power, while defining power as what our vital energy does. Great health is produced through the integration of the varied instincts within oneself. For Nietzsche, nihilism is the denial of our higher impulses in favor of the more primitive ones. Fascists aim for low-grade power, unable to conceive of more complex forms of power; these petty tyrants of stunted growth impose their will on others, creating a new form of decadence that replaces the prevailing one.
Nietzsche recognizes that we contain all lower and higher impulses, and must penetrate to the depths of our own nature in order to overcome the lower impulses that seek power over others. His ideal is similar to that of martial artists who have attained refined self-control rather than express their power through domination and acts of violence. In this way they approach the universal dimension, taking themselves to the next qualitative level by realizing integrated consciousness. The result is greater empowerment, an emphasis on the vertical ascent of consciousness. The goal is to overcome the flatness of modern life with its mechanical notions of equality by promoting human excellence and the expansion of consciousness.
Nietzsche’s approach to history, Pascal asserts, involves moving back in time in order to propel humanity into the future. Modern history is not the story of linear progress wherein the past is overcome and consigned to oblivion. Nietzsche wants us to reexamine this past and fully descend into it, thereby reclaiming the Dioynsian life-giving element. Technological mastery over nature and others represents a false ascension, neither an enhancement of power nor its more complex realization. There is a strong communitarian and mythological dimension in Nietzsche’s outlook, but he does not view the ancient religions as superior to modern belief systems. He also opposes the hierarchies run by priesthoods and military leaders whose aim is domination over the herd. For him, the role of advanced individuals is to guide the folk community to function better.
Although Nietzsche roundly condemns Christianity for denying life, he respects the character of Jesus, seeing Christ as a powerful figure who did not retaliate against his tormentors. Refusing to harbor resentment or to blame others, Christ was able to make a deep impression on history, even though the institutionalization of his message decreased its power and weakened cultural vitality. The early Christians used ascetic ideals as a means of taking empowerment to the next level, but the later Christians tried to find a shortcut to power by suppressing their impulses and sabotaging life. This unhealthy interpretation of the ascetic ideal is responsible for the decadence that plagues our contemporary world.
Many admirers of Nietzsche try to build the strongest possible case for the gentle Nietzsche, to whom nationalism, antisemitism, and fascism are anathema. In this regard, Pascal argues that Nietzsche, in his humanistic phase, made a decisive break with the regressive and atavistic stance of his early work, The Birth of Tragedy, where he enthusiastically promoted Richard Wagner’s cultural agenda. When it became clear to him that Wagner was putting forth degenerative myths and lowering the collective intelligence, he condemned German nationalism for its cultural decadence: superstitious, stupid, and murderous, totally opposed to his ideal of the good European. The good European incorporates rational and critical thinking and a healthy individuality, products of Renaissance humanism in its highest flowering.
Pascal, though, does not think Nietzsche’s thought is in full harmony with humanist and Enlightenment assumptions. He emphasizes both the gentle and wild sides of his work, since, he believes, to an unparalleled degree, Nietzsche integrates both his strong and weak points to create a unique artistic whole, accepting his personal lacks in their own terms and folding them into his overall project. The lacks that Pascal is referring to include many qualities that are prominent in descriptions of the wild Nietzsche.
For example, Nietzsche relies on style just as much as content to convey his message in the manner of a musician revealing the subtlest themes of the era. To prevent his ideas from ending up in the wrong hands, Nietzsche adopts a polarizing and provocative manner of speech, planting landmines that trigger ordinary readers and intentionally mislead them. The result is a relentless critique of conventional values, the smashing of all that is hollow, and the championing of the solid and healthy ways that take us to the far side of contemporary nihilism. Nietzsche’s good European, filled with Dionysian energies, reveres Beethoven, Goethe, and other culture heroes, integrating the diverse sides of human nature.
Nietzsche and Wilber
How strong is Pascal’s case for a metamodern Nietzsche? Let’s first look at Nietzsche’s fit with the integral perspective of Ken Wilber. After all, one of Pascal’s stated aims is to bring Nietzsche and Wilber together. This means viewing Nietzsche as a developmental thinker. Since his opposition to what Wilber calls retro-romantic views is clear, this interpretation is plausible. For example, Nietzsche champions Enlightenment values as an advance over regressive mythological consciousness. He commits what Wilber calls the pre-trans fallacy in The Birth of Tragedy by giving unstinting support to Wagner’s decadent romanticism, but remedies this failing by recognizing the positive aspects of modernity in his later work: the flowering of the individual during the Renaissance, the development of scientific and critical attitudes, and the vision of a more highly evolved human.
But is Pascal’s image of Nietzsche compatible with Wilber’s developmental perspective? In my reading of Wilber, the modernist elements stand out, whereas input from mythological and postmodern thought is more limited. Pascal sees Nietzsche’s wildness as central to human development but Wilber views the lingering remnants of the mythic outlook as the greatest threat to world peace. Although he maintains that earlier stages must be transcended and included, Wilber suggests that loving kindness and the widening of the circle of empathy are the main qualities emerging in the mythic-membership stage that ought to be preserved. His emphasis is on the negative aspects of mythic thought: its ethnocentrism, conformism, and intolerance, especially its fundamentalist approach to knowledge that holds back progress, often restricting present-day consciousness to a prepersonal level.
In contrast, Nietzsche exhorts us to loosen the grip on our notion of a separate individual identity in order to reconnect with our primal energies. In opposition to Wilber’s progressive outlook wherein each succeeding stage represents a higher level of consciousness than the previous one, Nietzsche wants to reclaim the vital energies present in mythic thought. So he prefers the thought of the pre-Socratics to the sterile rationalism that followed and taps into the Dioynsian spirit of the early Greeks who were in important regards at a higher level of development than we are today.
Nietzsche characterizes his era in terms of its nihilism, devitalized energies, and a narrow rationalistic outlook, none of which are conducive to the emergence of the ultrahuman. Pascal claims that for Nietzsche the path to the ultrahuman is through the integration of qualities such as revelry, humor, anarchy, indulgence, coupled with an artistic temperament, willingness to collaborate, and deep self-awareness. But the traits of Wilber’s spiritually evolved humans seem closer to those of the gentle rather than the wild Nietzsche. In his comments on postmodern thought and contemporary US politics, Wilber praises rational thought and big-picture approaches characteristic of modernism while opposing a postmodern stance whose more skeptical view of truth, and morality and focus on the particular and is closer to Nietzsche.
Nietzsche’s critique extends beyond the modern world. According to Pascal, he abhors exoteric religion and would have serious reservations toward what is now called postmodernism. The path to perfection offered by conventional religion is insufficient for experiencing spiritual awakening. It often leads to spiritual materialism when what is needed is rather a willingness to die to all the senses in order to become open to the descent of spirit. Guidance comes from the mystical and esoteric teachings at the core of the traditional religions; the prevailing religious doctrines and norms do not promote spiritual regeneration.
With regard to the postmodern temper, although Nietzsche would have appreciated Derrida’s deconstruction and Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge, Pascal sees him as putting conventional religion, scientific materialism, and the postmodern outlook in the same box. They do not focus on the evolution of consciousness, the vertical dimension, and thus are incapable of taking us to the other side of nihilism.
The Nietzschean and integral outlooks share the common goal of nurturing higher forms of human beings. They also take similar multicategorical and multiperspectival approaches to knowledge, attempting to integrate the various aspects of human nature into a coherent whole of greater complexity. Nietzsche views such coherence as maximum empowerment while integral thinkers see it as nondual awareness, truth, and liberation. Integralists point out that exoteric religions hinder rather than promote spiritual realization, a position that Nietzsche strongly upholds.
Pascal interprets Nietzsche as agreeing with Wilber that spiritual growth reflects the highest stage of any line. However, Nietzsche talks about instincts instead of lines, emphasizing the need to sink down strong roots in order to build the tree. He starts at the lowest level of development so that a line can be refined. Pascal also notes Nierzsche’s assertion that we need to grieve the death of God in order to go beyond God. This is an important break with the Enlightenment assumption that the vertical dimension of development can be ignored since humans have no higher spiritual needs. Pascal rightly asserts that there is a lot at stake as humanity comes to terms with nihilism. Will the outcome be the greater harmonization of instincts that Nietzsche views as humanity’s potentially bright future or will there be increased disintegration of instincts with all the regression, sickness, and degeneration that it implies?
The larger integral perspective with its aim of bringing a new spiritual era into being can be divided into three major streams, the integral yoga of Aurobindo, the mutational view of Gebser, and Wilber’s integral theory. Metamodernism fits largely within the Wilber stream, but in Pascal’s version, it is hard to reconcile with Wilber’s progressivism. As I have argued, Pascal’s Nietzsche aligns neither with Enlightenment progressivism nor the retroromanticism that Wilber derides. It more closely resembles Gebser’s approach in which the earlier mutations (archaic, magic, mythic, and mental) are integrated, forming a new structure of consciousness.
Pascal has shown that important aspects of Nietzsche’s thought are consistent with integral perspectives. He has made an impressive case for a spiritual Nietzsche. But the question remains as to whether his interpretation does justice to the overall texture of Nietzsche’s thought and whether Nietzsche is really a suitable candidate for metamodern canonization. Should Zarathustra be considered, as Pascal proposes, the first Western postmetaphysical spiritual hero? By examining the work of key interpreters of Nietzsche, we can further explore the compatibility of Nietzsche’s philosophy and metamodernism. In addition, taking a multiperspectival lens provides a fuller and more comprehensive view of Nietzsche that accords with the metamodern emphasis on bringing divergent standpoints into dialogue with each other.
Nietzsche on Ethics
Nietzsche’s writings on morality, psychologically acute and filled with bold provocations, remain fresh and worth contemplating. But they present problems that should not be taken lightly. What does Nietzsche’s immoralism imply as a guide to conduct? Are its social and political consequences acceptable? An evaluation of Pascal’s espousal of Nietzsche as a prophet for our time should carefully consider these issues.
A weighty objection to Nietzsche’s immoralism has been raised by Philippa Foot, the influential British moral philosopher of the late twentieth century. She sees Nietzsche’s rejection of moral principles as stemming from his belief that there are different ranks of people, higher and lower. His approach to value is aesthetic rather than ethical. Since the Superman, for whom the way is being prepared, is of ultimate value, such higher beings must be free to create their own values. In contrast, the herd dresses up the weakness of the dominant slave morality to appear good, justifying its restriction of the behavior of superior beings. It protects the lower orders from injustice and oppression at the cost of promoting sickness and decline. Slave morality, motivated by resentment and ill will, prevents the emergence of the most splendid human: strong, fine, noble, and subtle.
Nietzsche celebrates being apart from and higher than the herd, what he calls the “pathos of distance.” His insistence on human inequality, means that he has no concern for justice. But Foot points out that we don’t need to believe in equality of ability to recognize that we all face the same human predicament. When Nietzsche justifies life in aesthetic rather than ethical terms, he is asking us to give up the notion of human equality. Are we willing to give up this powerful conviction that underlies our ethical practices? Can we accept that there are no acts of injustice so terrible that they can be judged wrong, regardless of who performs them. Nietzsche is right in insisting that his ideas are fearful. He is asking us to renounce what is precious to who we are.
In the early postwar era, Thomas Mann raised similar objections to those made by Foot regarding Nietzsche’s critique of morality. Reflecting on the “soul” of a people who had recently experienced an unprecedented catastrophe, Mann saw Germany as having retreated into the barbarism that Nietzsche believed was necessary to overcome the limits of modern civilization. Hitler and Stalin were not Nietzsche’s ideals, but his romanticizing evil wickedness appears miserable indeed in light of twentieth-century history.
For Mann, aesthetics and ethics are opposed as fundamental approaches to living, not life and morality as Nietzsche proclaimed. Although Mann agrees with Nietzsche that the ethical strand that developed in Judaism and Christianity culminating in events like the French Revolution brought us where we are today, he thinks Nietzsche’s alternative to such “herd morality” is disastrous. The warrior ethos that Nietzsche glorifies is amoral, views society as a means for war, and leads to barbarism that results in much ruin.
Mann sees psychology as Nietzsche’s ruling passion. His psychology of morals is based on suspicion and dedicated to exposure. Suspecting all positive impulses to originate in negative ones, he praises the evil ones for ennobling and exalting life. He also views the intellect as the servant of the will to power. The downgrading of the importance of knowledge that this implies, Mann finds highly objectionable.
Going further, Mann questions Nietzsche’s claim that there is no vantage point outside life from which one can reflect on it. Unlike thought, the human spirit has this type of authority through criticism, irony, and freedom, judgment expressed in words. “Spirit is the self-criticism of life.” Mann also charges Nietzsche with misconceiving the power relationship between instinct and intellect. A frequent danger through history has been the failure of the mind to control the lower impulses; it is only in modern times, a unique historical situation, that Nietzsche’s pleas to liberate the Dionysian energies make sense, given our need to counterbalance the prevailing rationalist excess.
The critiques of Nietzsche’s immoralism by Foot and Mann are devastating. The metamodern spirit, as Pascal describes it, aims to bring together the most valuable insights from different perspectives, a spirit that cannot easily accommodate Nietzsche’s dismissal of the Western ethical tradition. While acknowledging that modernity is an unfinished project, Pascal holds up a transrational spiritual model that integrates the cultural consciousness of premodern, modern, and postmodern eras. But Nietzsche is not a suitable inspiration for this vast and ambitious undertaking because his appreciation of the positive features of modern consciousness falls quite short. His overall view of modernity is not balanced, even though his undermining of some of the modern West’s treasured ethical assumptions deserves our appreciation.
Nietzsche on Politics
Let’s now examine Nietzsche’s impact on German political thought and practice. This question first came to the fore at the time of World World I and became much more urgent with the appropriation of Nietzsche by the cultural and political leaders of the National Socialist Party in the 1930s. From that time onward a clear distinction was evident between those who viewed Nietzsche’s ideas as having considerable political impact and those who found little connection between his philosophy and the actions of politicians. In the first camp were those who interpreted Nietzsche as a leading right-wing thinker, sympathetic to fascism, who rejected the Western’s cultural tradition, whereas those in the second camp believed that Nietzsche’s philosophy expressed what is best in that tradition: liberal, humanist, and peaceful.
On the eve of World War II, Crane Brinton, an American historian, offered an influential analysis of the “wild” Nietzsche. He portrayed the great philosopher as meeting many of the key needs of the National Socialist Party, singling out the will to power, a new breed of Supermen, and the transvaluation of all values in which what had once become evil is deemed good. Nazis also shared Nietzsche’s ardent desire to remake the world, to experience rebirth, and to bring about social renewal (qualities present in all major revolutionary movements).
Brinton did note that there were important elements of Nietzsche’s thought that the Nazis could not assimilate. For example, Nietzsche’s disdain for Bismarck’s Germany, his opposition to 19th century nationalism and anti-antisemitism, and his ideal of the good European. His political thought, despite statements favoring an authoritarian and militant, harsh and heroic society, also had anarchist tendencies coupled with attacks on the state as the coldest of all monsters. However, what stands out most for Brinton are the similarities in general emotional tone and the congruence of Nazi doctrine with Nietzsche’s contempt for humanitarian movements, Christianity, and parliamentary government.
This eminent historian of revolutions had little sympathy for the argument of gentle Nietzscheans that the Nazis misunderstood and mistakenly applied his doctrines. Nietzsche, the writer of dithyrambic prose and tortured rhetoric, moved people; his philosophy was an effective weapon of Nazi propaganda. Whether or not he would have been a Nazi himself is not relevant to the question of his actual political impact.
Clearly, Brinton does not consider the aspects of Nietzsche’s thought that Pascal emphasizes: the ideals of artist and philosophical visionary, the sublimation and spiritualization of lower impulses, and the veneration of Goethe, admiration of Emerson, and appreciation of the novels of Stendhal and Dostoevsky. Brinton is aware that Nietzsche’s thought has many streams and not all lead to fascism, but his point about the compatibility of many of Nietzsche’s leading ideas with fascist ideology is valid.
In light of significant weaknesses in the ethical and political dimensions of his philosophy, what can be rescued to serve our needs today? We need to take a deeper look at the spiritual aspects of Nietzsche’s thought to make an informed judgment on the nature and degree of his contribution to integral thought and sensibility.
The Spiritual Nietzsche
Erich Heller, the Austrian Jewish literary and cultural critic, had to leave his homeland in the 1930s, settling in the US in 1960. Known for his studies of German literature and thought, his essays on Nietzsche in relation to Goethe, Burckhardt, and Rilke and on Zarathustra describe the spiritual depths and heights that Nietzsche inhabited. These essays reflect not only Heller’s passionate engagement with his subject but also his skillful use of religious and philosophical ideas to gain insight into the large issues at hand. His claim is that the central preoccupation of some great German poets, writers, and thinkers has been the increasing devaluation of life in an overwhelmingly prosaic age.
In his discussion of Nietzsche’s reverence for and debt to Goethe, Heller locates Nietzsche among those disinherited German and other artists whose creative possibilities were increasingly limited by the prosaic age in which they lived. Europeans had once lived in a world of symbols, a time when the gods were still present, where the symbol was directly meaningful, not merely an allegory or pointing to an obscure unconscious realm. Real and alive in its immediacy and concreteness, its truth was not questioned so the issue of belief or disbelief did not arise. This was the poetic age in which Goethe lived, although it was already in decline in his time.
As Heller shows, by the late nineteenth century the prosaic age had fully arrived, a time in which, as Goethe said, myth and poetry became disenchanted and reason itself mystified. The belief of reason that meaningful coherence can be found behind the strangeness and chaos of events disappeared. It is an age of unbelief that Goethe laments for its sterility. How miserable compared to its opposite: “All epochs dominated by belief in whatever shape have a radiance and bliss of their own, and bear fruit for their people as well as for posterity.”
Heller emphasizes that Nietzsche shared these visions. He, too, like Goethe, longed for a time when reason, feeling, sensuality, and will are no longer separated. Goethe’s notion of belief did not imply downgrading of this world in favor of a transcendental realm, a sentiment that Nietzsche strongly affirmed. He also appreciated the famous statement of Goethe: “In a true symbol, the particular represents the universal, not as a dream or shadow, but as the living and instantaneous revelation of the unfathomable.” Nietzsche also shared Goethe’s ideal of personality as a balance between being and knowledge. As Nietzsche put it, “Man ought not to know more of a thing than he can creatively live up to.”
But Nietzsche and Goethe cannot be viewed only as kindred souls. Heller sees Nietzsche’s engulfment by the prosaic age as crucial. Goethe was able, after much doubt and struggle, to gain freedom, joyfully and confidently accepting fate, what Nietzsche called the highest faith. But with full entrance into the prosaic age, this faith was driven to despair. So Nietzsche can only invoke the spirit of Dionysius to transform such despair to affirmation, a radical departure from Goethe’s serenity, love of order, harmony, and balance. His affirmation of life, in opposition to Goethe, is tragic. He sees the coming of nihilism as inevitable and the only way to affirm life is through a harsh and strenuous discipline in which whatever hurts him is affirmed, even the sacrifice of his own blood.
Nietzsche is a postmetaphysical prophet as Pascal recognizes. But does he offer the understanding and path to spiritual liberation that the integral thinkers seek? No doubt, the side of his thought in the tradition of Goethe has a luminous spiritual dimension with much to recommend it. But what about his philosophy on the whole? After all, Nietzsche did not try to build a system nor strive for consistency, and his creative insights took him in different contexts in directions that may sometimes seem opposed.
The American comparative philosopher, David Loy, has made an overall assessment of Nietzsche’s spiritual philosophy. Loy, a qualified Zen teacher and author of many books on Buddhism, critiques Nietzsche’s radically new orientation to the understanding of ethical values, the search for truth, and the meaning of life. In spite of many key insights such as the constructed nature of morality, knowledge, and truth, he argues that Nietzsche falls short in crucial ways.
Nietzsche is clearly aware that the distinction between this world and a higher spiritual one assuages human anxiety and serves a need for security. His critique of religious values is effective, but aristocratic values, his alternative, are motivated by this same anxiety. The ideal of a heroic ego and full self-mastery cannot give us the ease and security we crave, since the ego can never gain the grounding it seeks because it is always separate from the world. It is a construction whose purpose is to provide security and ward off threats to its survival, a futile and frustrating pursuit. In Buddhism, when the ego is itself recognized as the cause of our suffering and let go of, ethical action is then performed without effort or purpose in the spirit of play.
Nietzsche likewise understands that the quest for truth has led to the imposition of a tyrannical will to power, stemming from the same need for security. But his preferred solution, the heroic will to power, in sublimated or spiritualized form, is not viable. It is an unsuccessful attempt to deal with the underlying anxiety. No assertion of the will to power, even in its most refined forms, can give us the assurance we seek. In Buddhism, knowledge of our true identity allows us to relax and give up the ego’s various quests. We tread lightly in the world, viewing truth as play.
Buddhism explains that the basic problem of human insecurity is the result of a belief in the separate self, disconnected from others, nature, and the cosmos. Our attempts to find a way to ground ourselves and overcome feelings of vulnerability and powerlessness lead us on a never ending search that is ultimately frustrating and fruitless, since it is only by recognizing that we are the creator of our own delusions of identity that true relief is possible. Our suffering ends when we come to know who we really are.
Pascal has helped us to recognize the great value of Nietzsche’s spiritual insights. Clearly, Nietzsche’s cultural critique and predictions of future dangers seem even more impressive in the early twenty-first century. Nevertheless, his philosophy falls short in its understanding of the sources of our current meaning crisis and the way out. There are serious issues in his understanding of the spiritual dimension, and especially the nature of morality and politics. For these reasons, he should not be considered an integral thinker or metamodernist before his time.
