Im Kampf um Gott
Fresh off her break with Nietzsche, Lou decided to create her own salon in Paris trying to be like Malwida, but her personality was more typically narcissistic. For example, she did some triangulation to make Rée jealous by stating that Nietzsche had a “beautiful mouth.” Ludwig Hüter, a student of Neo-Kantian Friedrich Paulsen, was a correspondent for Malwida. “In his report to Malwida he called Lou ‘too odd a girl to be easily made out…a likable, winning, truly feminine being who renounces all womanly resources in the struggle for existence and instead takes up men’s weapons with a certain harsh exclusiveness. Sharp judging and, as it turns out, condemning of everything; no trace of mercy, so dear to woman; clear resoluteness in every word, yet her character only appears the more onesided for being so resolute in its one direction; music, art, poetry are discussed, to be sure, but gauged by a strange standard: not pure joy over their beauty, pleasure in their form, comprehension of their substance, poetic enjoyment with heart and soul, no—only a cold, too often negative, corrosive philosophizing about them.” Giving her the benefit of the doubt he concluded “I dislike that skepticism which picks holes in everything and yet can offer nothing positive.—And yet I cannot believe that Miss Salomé will lose herself completely in this criticalism. She is not what is called disputatious: with her wonderful clarity of mind she aims only at truth, like all good people…A reaction must set in sooner or later; then her awakening femininity will assert itself, and something superb will come of this richly gifted girl.”
Even if people didn’t always understand Lou’s motivation, one letter to Henrik Gillot explained her general plans for life, which was an experiment with her inner guidance that went beyond a collective female emancipation. It was very personal, even to the point of ignoring the interdependence she had with her successive role models. “I can neither base my life on models nor make of my life a model for anyone; instead, I will most certainly fashion my life in my own way, whatever may come of it. With that, I need not represent any principle but something even more wonderful—something that resides within oneself and is warm with resounding life, something that jubilates and that wants out…One cannot be happier than I am because the fresh-holy-gay war that is about to begin does not frighten me; on the contrary, let it begin. We shall see whether or not the most common so-called ‘insuperable barriers’ erected by the world will turn out to be harmless chalk circles!”
As successful as Lou’s group was, which included visits from Schopenhauer expert and exponent of Indian philosophy, Paul Deussen, and philologist Heinrich Romundt, both of them knew Nietzsche personally, and his absence was felt. She wrote idealistically about her relationship with Rée, breaking away from her mother, as well as Nietzsche, but she was becoming restless. “Early in 1883 she commenced collecting precipitate marriage proposals with one from the experimental psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus—her object being, vanity apart, to supply Nietzsche’s omission in the long run by the logic of one more, one less.” Rée wondered about the fractured trinity that turned to a dyad by asking “whatever will it be like if one of us marries someday?” They both kept up appearances and hoped to impress others with their arguments, and especially with Lou’s breadth of knowledge.
As others came and went from the duo, they were always wondering what Nietzsche was up to. Lou was given a copy of Zarathustra, which was considered too stuffy and moralistic compared to the more Voltaire influenced earlier works. When Lou became sick, she retreated with Rée to southern Tyrol near Bolzano. Exiled from the Nietzschean circle, she worked on her first book In Struggle For God, which made a splash as being a mixture of fiction and autobiography of her experiences in the Trinity. The book covers a variety of topics related to a childhood happiness with pleasing God, and the conflict between that and modern reason where we please ourselves. The Kuno character, a representative of both Nietzsche and Lou, is a son of a parson, but modern intellect destroys his faith, which creates a sense of guilt as if murdering God. The world without God becomes a confusing place where human desires are both compelling and create fear that too much evil will be let loose. The loss of belief in God doesn’t extinguish the desire to search for it in different places. Binion’s review of the book viewed it as wish-fulfillment superimposed on the actual relationships in the trinity plus her experience with Gillot. There’s a restlessness in what people read in her book where one is struggling to find the right combination of an ideal relationship and failing miserably. Either the high quality relationship is impermanent or there’s some power exploitation that gets in the way of it’s purity. Without God, there’s no compass to direct oneself confidently. “The struggle for God means the struggle to find out what to do with overwhelming, onward-driving emotions which once, in the trusting Christianity of childhood, were directed to ‘God’ but which lost that object when intellect developed. Kuno plunges through his life like someone in a fever, looking for—not a purpose, and not an explanation, and not peace either, but—a dynamic repository for himself, something in which his feelings can be engaged and be creative. It may be love for a woman—provided this doesn’t become sexual or domestic—or it may be teaching, either a group of young people or a single pupil. He keeps finding it, but it doesn’t last and he plunges on, leaving destroyed people in his wake. He is himself never judged, except implicitly as one whose life was worthwhile because he insisted on freedom, was ready for anything, felt strongly and loved life as absolutely as Christians love God.”
In a way, the characters are trapped in their search for a human God to worship, as well as trying to narcissistically become one at the same time by mastering each successive role model, but in the end, mortality cannot be transcended. Kuno in old age summarizes: “I have found no peace in old age, only the powerful and painful discontent of the creative spirit…The longer, the more fiercely, a man fights in the struggle of life, the more it will become, beyond its deepest woes, a progress from God to God.” It’s a mixture of Buddhist equanimity and later psychoanalytic liberations, but there’s a struggle to balance the contradiction between a search for peace or strong feelings, which was to be later developed in Freud’s system that tries to balance the influences of the Id, Ego, and Super-ego. No realistic peace can be had unless pain is accepted, and reticence will not be an escape. “But what else is there for a man of his intellectual honesty who is equally skeptical of the ancient faith in God and the modern faith in reason? Nothing. He has to face the truth that life is meaningless, that there is no salvation, religious or secular, and that our best hope is to overcome it by embracing the Buddhistic ideal of Nirvana. But Kuno is passionately opposed to the doctrine of resignation. Beset by doubts and moral anxieties he still affirms the magnificence and grandeur of life and resolves to make it ‘the highest means of a highest goal.'” The problem with throwing out religious precepts, because some of those safeguards are helpful in practical ways, there unfortunately can enter a creeping narcissism leading to relationships where people are only objectified and consumed, as intense emotions decay again and again. Worshipping God has the practical value of improving human standards of conduct to create more harmony in society, and atheism doesn’t avoid religious attitudes, because imitation of role models is already a form of worship. Even if Judeo-Christian mores are replaced with Greco-Roman one’s, there were still Gods that represented different virtues and they were meant to be copied so as to again improve social standards for cooperation.
The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html
Ingmar Bergman explains the meaning of Through A Glass Darkly: https://youtu.be/P_gc4hM7CuM?si=FDZEtiBHpK7rGCCg
Through A Glass Darkly (Last Scene): https://youtu.be/w6YD7Z0EtlM?si=-JQNfaynsFsTpUbs
Winter Light: Ingmar Bergman introduction: https://youtu.be/mEe-9fiEvVk?si=X7DcK-x_O0yHgcl-
Becoming who we are moment from Bergman’s Winter Light: https://youtu.be/UobjuK4Lw8w?si=-XjYCgw0xQyulEoE
The Silence (1963) Original Trailer: https://youtu.be/xddkAomes8k?si=wpuATQwuYt1oasYk
Searching for Ingmar Bergman – Official UK Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHfcjmO0pZc
Searching For Ingmar Bergman (2018) Clip: Daniel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whQe1MIKJow
Documentary Review: Searching for Ingmar Bergman – Narcissism: https://rogersmovienation.com/2018/10/27/documentary-review-searching-for-ingmar-bergman/
The struggles in the book led to self-reproach and suicide in some cases, while those who could tolerate and even embrace their moral stains found a solace in having lived intensely with the only life that one knows is real. “We see Lou von Salomé arguing against conventional morality: [the restrained character] has spent his life respecting his parents, behaving kindly, keeping even self-destructive promises, giving up the girl he loves, practising chastity—and has found happiness impossible. Meanwhile Kuno disobeys the parents, goes in for every excess, and causes the deaths of three women, but he keeps his belief in himself and in ‘life.’ The strange thing is that what justifies him is his faith in his ideal and yet we scarcely know what the ideal is: it does not seem to have a verbal form, but has to do with the quality and intensity of his feelings. Intensity justifies all, as the Tautenburg diary said.” This paved the way for later psychological theories on how to make a compromise between self-indulgence and self-denial. There’s a point where the saint becomes despicable if the balance goes too far one way, and the permissive type can appear too codependent, servile towards a socially devised “God,” full of procrastination, and uneventfulness. There are competing feelings that one could be wasting one’s time by delaying gratification, and one could also slip into shame very quickly and devastatingly if permissiveness ignores the potential damage done to oneself or others. One is to laud one’s life story, including all the imperfections in them, but I think if mistakes aren’t learned from, Kuno’s emptiness would still be larger than a secular person who tries to learn from every source, religious or not.
A Racy Book – The Remains of the Day: https://youtu.be/JtqEy9DW91U?si=dHYpXn70-1FPqPdP
As each member of the trinity published and moved in their own directions, the group could never get back together. “Rée had had enough of chaperoning Lou, and Lou enough of his chaperoning.” Rée wasn’t able to become a university lecturer and so he chose to study medicine instead. Lou’s book “became a bestseller, followed by enthusiastic reviews and devoted fan mail. It was particularly popular among educated young ladies who enjoyed the seductive mix of philosophical profundity and sexual drama. They became the core audience of her future novels and many wrote her letters praising her work well into her old age. The subjects Lou discussed in the novel—love, sex, philosophy and God—were the author’s major concerns. The intense philosophical conversations that took place between Lou and Nietzsche were voiced by Kuno and Jane. ‘The pattern for five or ten pages of action is followed by ten or twenty of moralizing,’ as if she had alternately written ‘the former ‘dreamingly’ by moonlight and the latter thinkingly by sunlight.’ It was the very charm of her paradoxical personality. Many found In Struggle for God Lou’s unique spirit—her radiant golden personality and the piercing blue-white light of her intellect. In the book she reveals her surprising candor and thoughtfulness, as well as her personal struggle. Franz Overbeck called it the most astonishing book he had read that year. Overbeck sent a copy to Erwin Rohde, also a friend of Nietzsche’s, who read it with great eagerness and saw plenty of Nietzschean inspiration in it. Paul Deussen wrote, ‘I must admit, that while reading it my love for Lou blazed up in bright flames. With its various suicides, adulteries, and the like, it is diversely judged. My friend Ebbinghaus maintained that they were ‘a nun’s daydreams’ but I found much of her spirit in the book and fell in love with the spirit.’ Another mutual friend of Lou and Nietzsche, Henrich von Stein, discussed the book with him, who ‘praised the semi-novel of his soeur inséperable von Salomé.’ ‘There is a loftiness in it,’ Nietzsche wrote Overbeck, ‘and even if it’s not the eternal feminine which draws this pseudo-maiden ever onward then perhaps it is—the eternal masculine. And there are a hundred echoes of our Tautenburg conversations in it.”
Ibsen’s Heroines
a shot—and nothingness.
Lou was still ruminating about how she could continue her experiment beyond the trinity in a world that required conventional marriages at a certain age. “Her major concern was the effect [marriage] would have on her freedom and her right to develop her own personality. She was much intrigued when she heard rumors of ‘fictitious marriages’ that were current among the Russian intelligentsia—marriages in name only, platonic unions concluded between a man and a woman for the purpose of their mutual improvement, a sort of co-operation among comrades. ‘Others regarded it as a fine chance to show their contempt for an institution blessed by the Church and sanctioned by the State, a way of placing themselves above society while obeying its laws’…Her parents’ example showed that love and marriage were not mutually exclusive, as she thought, but while she loved her parents, especially her father, she felt that in such a relationship one partner, usually the woman, had to sacrifice her intellectual growth and subordinate her own personality to that of the husband. No matter how much her mother insisted that such subordination was a woman’s duty, Lou was violently opposed to it. If she got married at all she would insist on true equality, on a feeling of brotherhood, on respect for the sanctity of the other person, on altruism and mutual sympathy.”
Despite her avant-garde need for equality from men, her intellectual side would continue to attract amorous attention and proposals from men who would find her ideals and notions like a form of adorable insanity, projecting onto her as a darling to be rescued, and each man would assume they were the “right one.” To many men she appeared like a more modern Greek Hetaira, who were prostitutes that you would want to ravish, but instead of just trying to make them shut up and perform sex acts, the arousal on the contrary would come from the fact that they were also enjoyable conversationalists and intellectual social companions. “The distinguishing feature of Lou’s friendships and love affairs was that they always started on a high intellectual plane. For, although she was a very attractive woman, it was always her mind and the radiance of her being, her vitality and fervor, that attracted men.” Her relationship with Rée remained platonic which allowed her to meet other men. It was a mystery even to Lou why she eventually chose Friedrich Carl Andreas, but Binion provides some similarities between him and others in Lou’s life. It clues into the attraction for someone who is above her skills in someway, similar to how Caro described the kind of men that an independent woman would seek, and the sense of comfort and familiarity of the type that she felt as predictable, despite how contradictory at times her choice was compared to her ideals of equality. “Whereas he called himself Charles, Lou called him Fred (in writing, mostly ‘F.’), and soon after their engagement he Germanized his given names to Friedrich Carl. This hints at Nietzsche. So do his age and profession, his interest in Zarathustra, even his eye trouble—and a friendship with Erwin Rohde…Nietzsche had supplanted Rée by proxy…Legend has it that he sought Lou out after reading Struggling for God—her book so endowed with her spirit and so drenched in God and sex—and appeared unannounced one day at her door.” Lou was reconstituting the trinity again, which ended up being just another triangulation that bothered Rée more than the showed. Slowly over time, he set himself up to move out and leave Lou behind which pleased Andreas. Lou recounted that “Rée completed his medical studies. Later he moved to Celerina in Upper Engadine, where he served as a doctor among the poor. There, in the surrounding mountains, he accidentally fell to death.” There were rumors that it may have been suicide instead. Rée was purported to have said that “I have to philosophize. When I run out of material about which to philosophize, it is best for me to die.” Rée fell from a slippery cliff in the Charnadüra Gorge. H.F. Peters wrote that “a workman found him on the 28th of October, 1901, in the river Inn where he had plunged from a steep cliff near the spot where he and Lou had spent their happiest hours together more than fifteen years previously.”
Nietzsche only watched Lou’s new relationship from afar. “To me too Miss Salomé announced her engagement but I did not answer her either, sincerely as I wish her happiness and prosperity. This sort of person who lacks reverence must be avoided.” In 1892, Malwida also had a falling out where Lou “replied—gruff, embittered, deprecatory (not at all like herself)—’I was deceived in her. She let me down.'” Lou agreed to marry but was full of ambivalence as to whether this was an authentic choice or not. “With Fred she proved frigid: the marriage could not be consummated. Brooding through the first long months, she traced her trouble to a fixation ‘on the recent past:…detaching myself from it appeared to me on Rée’s account as misconduct, infidelity—not toward him, but toward myself.” This was especially the case because her relationship with Rée had that quality of friendship devoid of sex that made her feel safe. Andreas instead was a leader in his field, much like Nietzsche, but was going through a professional transition. His expertise was in epigraphy, and archeology, but a field such as this is demanding where interpretations and translations of ancient languages have to be painstakingly proved, often with officials casting doubt. In heated conflicts with those officials he had to quit, and he returned to Berlin and took up tutoring and teaching. “Lou was to depict him as the ultimate in demonic violence and instinctual disarray, domineering and weak-willed by fits and starts, his hybrid blood running alternately hot and cold like his baths; others saw him rather as manly and gentle in the long stretch, though with some temper and much caprice.” Rumor had it that he blew an inheritance on whoring, for example. “His mode of living was distinctively his: he would work by night and sleep by day, wear starkly simple clothing, eat no meat, drink terrifyingly black coffee, take hot and cold baths by quick turns, and walk barefoot through brush. He adored animals—who reciprocated: strange cats would climb him as he ambled along…The couple lived first in Tempelhof just south of Berlin—in Andreas’s bachelor apartment to begin with, and then in a dilapidated mansion.” Lou was still able to keep up with intellectual movements in Berlin by reading. They were also members of the Freie Bühne, which was a theater with avant-garde performances rejected by the official theater. She also contributed to journals and refused to join any schools while continuing to only follow her own guidance.
As she continued writing, her next publication moved into theater criticism with her Ibsen’s Heroines. She found many insights from these women that described the plight, mostly of women, but also of men who suffered repression. To get beyond a feminist diatribe about men controlling women, Lou saw what everyone was experiencing at the dawn of the 20th century. There’s also a relativism in her view of what is considered ideal for each character. For some women, a need for exploration, creativity, and wonder is necessary to feel intense aliveness. She super imposes this ideal as being a masculine one, like an explorer, but also in the rebellious way it fights habituation. The way exploration behaves is that each discovery will become boring and yield eventually to another need to chase the line on the horizon. It’s the depression that happens when goals are completed and where only a new goal will bring back the energy. The sense of childhood exploration enters in as well where social conditioning has not yet had its say and new combinations are now possible when unfettered exploration is allowed to combine with others who are just as playful. “If the unattainable and the uncertain is implied by the idea of ‘wondrous,’ it also contains unlimited possibilities and perspectives.” When women in these stories are trapped, the world appears to be absent of free flowing wonder and motivation for activities are based on compulsion. “For Mrs. Alving, the perceived ideal no longer is the same as that for which Nora, who was ready for the struggle with youthful confidence, searched: a future wondrous happening that lay hidden beyond the distant horizon. For Mrs. Alving, there is no future, no line of the horizon where heaven and earth seem to merge harmoniously; she can only cast a glance upward and backwards upon an abandoned battlefield, strewn with the sacrifices that marked her life.”
One ideal for Lou, as well as Nietzsche, is intensity, vibrancy, and aliveness that they equate with good health, resembling “that of the instinctive nature of a wild bird.” Certainly for her, as well as for some of these characters, modern environments are not conducive to these feelings. “His ideals do not really constitute life-nourishment, nor do they produce strong and healthy sustenance for creative pleasure and work…And so his ideals, which were completely alien to her being, made her sickly.” Yet, this is just a personal preference. In order to develop skills that create more freedom, the confinement of modern life is not meaningless and arose in support of skill and development, if the suggestion by society is consented to by the individual. “To the extent that Nora’s emancipation represents not a personal whim but an ideal, the barriers which she had to surmount and the shackles she had to discard seemed to be undignified restraints. Nearly the opposite is true of Ellida. The world of the attic or the ivory tower with its constancy of order and confinement meant an empty doll’s house and prison for Nora; for Ellida, they offer the means for learning and shelter. Rebecca was inextricably caught in a world capable of taming wildlife and polishing raw material, but she was taught to know freedom only by its opposite. Ellida is the one to experience the wonder of an expansive love that shatters the walls of the attic and admits powerful draughts of freedom and truth. She stands in a world that is protective, a place of unity and conciliation.” Regardless of preference, when consent is not given, some of the characters resort to suicide when they feel they cannot make a free choice. “Hedda may only prove to herself the true existence of her inner freedom by cancelling herself out.”
Hedda Gabler – Henrik Ibsen Act IV: https://youtu.be/wTdMLnLTzpM?si=5u2cNfng-thY3NjU
The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche
After such an important encounter and influence from Nietzsche, Lou von Salomé, at the time, did a deeper dive into his works to try to bring out his true aims, and any reader with experience with psychology will understand quickly, but they will also notice some of the problems with his philosophy that later got refined in modern psychology. She wanted to assess the books with the experience of the man she knew to clear up what she thought were wrong interpretations others were making. “I wrote my book Friedrich Nietzsche in His Works with complete impartiality, moved only by the fact that after he became famous, so many young writers took up his ideas without understanding them; even I fully understood Nietzsche only after I had known him personally, when I had examined his ideas through his works. I only wanted to understand the figure of Nietzsche on the basis of these objective impressions.” Nietzsche grew up in the world of abstract philosophical speculation, but at some point he had to look at the “personal dossiers” his predecessors displayed in their various theories. This pointed directly to emotions, impulses, and instincts that are trying to be satisfied while at the same time disguise their motives from repressive social controls. “An idea then presented itself to him within the realm of positivism, the idea of the relativity of all thought, the reduction of all intellectual knowledge to the absolutely practical basis of the instinctual life from which it originates and on which it continues to depend.” The way forward with the obvious contradictions in Nietzsche’s thought is to remember the basis of impulses and motivation. They want to be satisfied. This helps when his ideas start to look like a bull in a china shop. Even his criticisms of Lou’s cat personality betray the fact that he wanted some kind of balance, even if it’s quite easy to read his stuff and get carried away with extremes. Those extremes naturally would prevent any goal satisfaction and one could easily be injured or dead if followed without discernment or concessions.
Otto – A Fish Called Wanda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAXLdyhweuE
A more balanced view of Nietzsche in comparing good and bad, or true and false, is to accept that many judgments fail to be accurate in the absolute. “What forces us above all to admit that there exists a substantial antithesis of ‘true’ and ‘false’? Is it not enough to recognize different gradations of illusion?” Some things are very obvious to people, but in the world of philosophy, science, and any complex territory with many moving parts, truth can be very difficult to establish, and splitting into black and white thinking is inappropriate in those cases. Criticizing truth isn’t necessarily to discard it through “its antithesis, but rather – [be] its refinement!” At some point, the lack of perfection in the world and in our human projects gives way to a feeling the something is wrong, requiring further refinement to satisfy that feeling.
Because man has emotions, some of the untruths can be emotionally felt as false, or inauthentic. Through emotional exploration, Nietzsche felt that provisional truths could move more towards absolute truth, though this is extremely ambitious, and in many reals cases current truths would require endless refinement with no belief that finality could ever be achieved. “The dependence of thought on the instinctual life of man—is precisely what, according to Nietzsche, should be maximally increased. The recognition of the relativity of thought, of the narrow boundaries assigned to the knowledge of truth, serves him only to proclaim a new limitlessness of knowledge that must restore to the latter its absolute character…transferring the sphere of knowledge to that of the movements of feeling and the inspirations of the will. All the dams that placed a brake and a limit are thus torn down and the affective life can overflow without restraint.” Yet, it cannot be forgotten that people like Nietzsche and all his friends operated always with some restraint, even to the point of looking not much different from anyone else.
Because values are often culturally selected by the powerful, Nietzsche was happy with fictional addons since the already traditional fictions are just as subjective. New cultures could be formed. “He exalts the value of illusion, of voluntary fiction, of what is not logical and ‘not true’ as forces that ultimately sustain life and increase the will. Nietzsche delights in the idea that we ourselves, as creators, introduce ourselves into the image of the world that we have built around ourselves, with all the particularity of our soul—and that our knowing is ultimately nothing other than a ‘humanization of things’—to the point where the world dissolves into a dream image that each individual can conceive on the basis of his own free will. And he asks: ‘Why could the world, which in some way concerns us, not be a fiction?’ with the hidden thought: and why then could it not be recreated with an act of force?” The narcissistic danger of course is how the real world may push back against our desires, but at the same time, reality can be bendable by science to conform to SOME of our designs. The free thinker “expresses falsity and illusions, but nevertheless knows how to make them true with his creative will, that is, [he] knows how to transform them into convincing realities.” But when reality remains unmoved, sadly, there’s still one emotional outlet left. “He who does not know how to place his will in things, at least puts a meaning into them.” I would also add that reality can help us to learn from the more modern perspective on therapy.
This saying YES to life eventually has to include all the strife that people are trying to avoid and those same negative emotions have to be met with complete acceptance. Otto Rank’s balance between letting go and emotional expression would be about physically feeling the suppression that’s trying to censor emotional expression, like a fake nonchalance, so expressing pain saves energy when suppression is not employed, while at the same time letting go of the past when those emotions naturally evaporate, also saves effort. This is a kind of getting-on-with-it mentality that allows for energy to be focused more on the activity that was prioritized, as well as all learning that has accrued. Only creativity, science, and direct action can eventually move what was once immovable. It’s a form of mental health where no part of life is excluded. “In all ages the wisest have judged life in the same way: it is worth nothing… Always and everywhere the same tone has been heard from their mouths—a tone full of doubts, of melancholy, of weariness of life, a tone full of opposition to life…Man is the sickest of animals.” For Nietzsche, this included all the prior philosophers who turn away from a full life, because it is a futile escape since one can never really escape from the consequences of an unlived life. “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly, turn inward—this is what I call the interiorization of man: in this way only does that which will later be called his ‘soul’ develop in man. The whole inner world, originally thin as if stretched between two epidermises, has acquired depth, breadth, height in proportion as man’s outward venting has been prevented.” These culture developments “introduced the greatest and most sinister of diseases, from which humanity has not yet recovered, the suffering that man has of man, of himself: the consequence of a violent separation from his animal past, of a declaration of war against the ancient instincts, on which until then his strength, his pleasure and his terribleness rested.”
Object Relations: Otto Rank Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v1gvsf5-object-relations-otto-rank-pt-2.html
In a psychologically balanced way, one could say that animal desires are natural and one has to find socially acceptable ways to discharge those passions, which is still a concern for psychology today, for example, sexually and aggression. It also includes new lifestyle combinations that can be supported, explored and tested. “It is the ages of long and peaceful habits in which it emerges in its new form, those in which rigid ties, severe discipline and the submission of individuals no longer seem necessary, since the instruments for enjoying life to the full are abundantly within reach. The rigid uniformity in which everyone has been brought up, with an education that is centuries old, begins to disappear and to give way to the play of individualities.” On the one hand, there are dangers with incompatibility, for example, broken homes, serial divorces, and eccentric ways of living that may not be sustainable. On the other hand, when desires can be discharged in various ways, the internal battles can be exhausted outwardly leading to more stable cycles of tension and release. “In the tranquil peace of an orderly life, man, who in the meantime has become strongly ‘internalized,’ has no other battlefield for his wild impulses outside himself. As soon as these begin to stir, he begins to suffer from himself again ‘thanks to the egoisms wildly turned against one another’ which his nature, having become exceedingly complicated, includes within itself, and through which he gradually again loses all the [integration] of his personality.”
Nietzsche does acknowledge that personality includes skill, and without practice, the energy to expand is blocked by one’s own inaction. “The real remedy for this rampant corruption would be to abandon oneself entirely to life, so that a new and superior form of health can be born from the chaotic richness of opposing elements in conflict with each other.” These skill developments for him would lead to the hope of ever more advanced humans after each successive generation, but at the same time, there’s an atavism to connect to an animal primitive energy as a starting point to fuel that inspiration. The blocked reservoir of libido is to be opened so that the creative juices can discharge into inspirations for new social and technological combinations. A release of intellectual orgasms. Too much repression leads to stagnate cultures where novelty ceases. A certain fearlessness is required to allow trial and error, creativity, and adventure. “The great man is an end; Genius—in work and action—is necessarily a squanderer: spending is its greatness…The instinct of self-preservation is, so to speak, suspended; the overwhelming pressure of the erupting forces inhibits any safeguard and any caution in this sense.” This goes to extremes to the point of using examples of tyrannical personalities, like Napoleon, who was able to create new societies, albeit with enormous collateral damage. Of course, anyone with any sense could say that once a tyrant like Napoleon gains ascendency, their attempts to consolidate power would just lead to more repression and crush new generations from adding their own contributions. A need to renounce absolute truth would be a necessary safeguard for freedoms and therefore prevent absolute power from arising out of dogma. Any new truths would not be emotionally invested in, since new benchmarks may be discovered later. Regardless, Nietzsche loves the “primordial man of action, active, happy, sure of his own instincts, careless…Excess is the path to the superhuman, and therefore it is anticipated by the cry: ‘But where is the lightning that licks you with its tongue? Where is the madness that should be inoculated into you?’ Behold, I teach you the Superman: he is that lightning and that madness!” The more controlled translation of Nietzsche’s ideal of psychological health would be to destigmatize the animal in man to allow for forgiveness, humor, understanding, and learning that is found in the modern therapy session.
2001: A Space Odyssey – Space Seed – Also Sprach Zarathustra – Strauss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3IkOL6Y0WA
The Ending to 2001: A Space Odyssey Explained By Kubrick – Subtitled: https://youtu.be/9BHV8PyLu40?si=gHbaZVsLBpiBkkYE
From another angle, there is some bulwark of Freudian Ego that can balance the idealistic-narcissistic Super-ego we’ve just been discussing, because Ego is more connected to realistic action and resides in the body, whereas any ego-ideal can ironically be another form of repression since there needs to be a realistic path towards that ideal goal. Unrealistic goals lead to posturing and procrastination as people return to their familiar habits. “The attempt of every morality to make man resemble an ideal-being proves to be only a fictitious imitation at the expense of true strength; every moral transformation is therefore only a kind of aesthetic camouflage for a weakened but otherwise completely unchanged human nature.” Real human effort is required and imagination alone will not do it. Ironically, the work itself may require many sacrifices of impulse in order to develop such high levels of skill required for true change. “Everything is allowed to you except one thing: you cannot give in, you cannot crumble during this work…” The way to measure success is by seeing the new paths that are left in the wake of this work to self-overcome, and in certain arenas of specialty you may end up in first place. “Now it has become your last refuge which formerly was called your last danger! Now your best courage must consist in there being no longer any other path behind you! Here no one shall come after you unseen! Your own foot has effaced behind you the path on which is written: impossibility.”
Žižek on how to stop wasting your life: a step by step guide – Julian de Medeiros: https://youtu.be/edCoeUWhEr0?si=aCYPNJmoYbGFF9ZC
Žižek on how to stop being depressed (Surplus Enjoyment/subjective destitution) – Julian de Medeiros: https://www.youtube.com/live/3ehpYPq0Zl8?si=67lradOROm1WlKs6
Ikigai: https://rumble.com/v1gvo41-ikigai.html
How to gain Flow in 7 steps – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html
The energy that ties together all this effort for Lou, was a human religion where values are recognized and turned into ideals, and then the power of worship is used to harness that energy for great works. “Her professed purpose was to pin down ‘the religious affect,’ as Nietzsche had prompted her to—and she did identify its two edifying components quite nicely: a feeling of deepest personal insufficiency and the very opposite. Her final purpose was what she took Nietzsche’s to have been: religious prophecy. She contended that the ‘science of religion’ must henceforth attend to the religious affect, presumably an all-human affect given a huge recent crop of books arguing from man’s ‘inner need’ for religion to its ‘pragmatic value.’ And she went on to present worship as the supreme manifestation of man, which rises with him from crude wishing through god-making to a longing for holy communion. She saw nothing to hamper piety in the recognition that gods are man-made; on the contrary, she declared that the only true gods were those knowingly devised by a worshipper to suit himself. Her hints at how gods are devised were strictly rhetorical: once the religious affect is self-avowed, ‘human strength and majesty…create a god owing to no inconsequence of thought, but to the religious productivity of the entire self aspiring aloft’; religious mystification will soonest cease ‘if modern man gains the force not only to turn away from whatever his reason exposes as deception, but also to turn toward whatever conduces to his uninhibited inner development’; to become religiously productive as of old despite the new ‘frightful unbridgeable gap’ between ‘thinking and believing,’ we must face up to ‘our need and loneliness in our god-abandonment’ and not ‘try to fool ourselves with any philosophical sham-god’; the ‘one thing needful’ is the courage to look within ourselves to where ‘the saving god has every time emerged.’ These prescriptions resemble nothing so much as Lou’s Tautenburg formula for Nietzsche’s idealizing, the more since now as then she treated ideals as equivalent to gods for devotional purposes. Thus she set up as Nietzschean god-maker—while tacitly asserting that she had created her childhood god knowingly and that he had been true nonetheless.”
Here we have the prescription for modern society. Even in politics, both the Marxists and the Ayn Rand types took up this mantle for all their efforts to make the world in man’s image. The modern depression that comes from doing things externally to feel whole, with constant reminders that every goal is mortal and death leads to oblivion, was beginning to be felt in the educated population as science replaced religion. The sense of lack could easily fall into modern envy if inspiration is not found and if skills aren’t sufficiently developed to survive the modern technological world that was already underway. Despite Lou’s insights about authenticity, unless you invented something new, you are copying others through idol worship, which idols feel as competition, even if they also copied as well. There’s also a need to move from a helplessness in youth to be a master as an adult with sadomasochistic undercurrents and intergenerational struggles for dominance. There was no guarantee that a Nietzschean resent-er stuck in internal battles would find fulfilling goals in life as a cure, or develop enough skill or beauty to be accepted by others. The need to then scapegoat and blame others would continue as before and lead to the consequences found in the 20th century.
Im Kampf um Gott – Lou Andreas-Salomé: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781016053921/
Ibsen’s Heroines – Lou Andreas-Salomé: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780879101312/
Nietzsche – Lou Andreas-Salomé and Siegfried Mandel: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780933806313/
Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple – Rudolph Binion: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780691618609/
My Sister, My Spouse – H.F. Peters: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393007480/
Looking Back – Lou Andreas-Salomé: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781569248485/
Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography – Rudiger Safranski: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393050080/
Salomé, her life and work – Livingstone, Angela: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780918825049/
Lou von Salomé – Julia Vickers: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780786436064/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/