The prologue of Thus Spake Zarathustra [1]echoes Plato’s cave analogy. Nietzsche rejected Plato’s transcendental reality but he was influenced by Plato to some extent. Plato’s ideal was the austere Socrates. His cave is the soul’s struggle to break free from the chains of ignorance and find the light of justice, wisdom, truth. The seer returns to the cave to pull his dungeon mates out of darkness. Is Plato elitist? Of course! For all that his philosopher king is a far cry from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s take away from Plato is the idea that the only people who matter in a community are great individuals - artists, intellectuals, what Russell calls the anarchist aristocracy. Plato’s cave is the journey from the dark imprisonment of ignorance to the light of truth – for every seeker. Those who are strong enough to see the world in the blazing light of the sun become leaders of the community. For Nietzsche, the journey out of the cave gets transformed into ‘self-transcendence’ in the Darwinian sense of each surviving organism ‘surpassing’ creatures who fail to adapt and hence perish:
‘Man is something that is to be surpassed....what is the ape to man? A laughing stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.’ (Nietzsche, p.20)
Evolution, for Nietzsche is linear. Every new species is better than the previous one. From this it follows that the new prophet, Zarathustra is better than the old prophet, Christ or the older prophet Zoroaster. The bible consecrated the ‘Thou.’ It is replaced by the sacred ‘I,’ the ego. The commandment to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ is replaced by ‘love the farthest, the future ones, i.e. the coming superman (p.77). Nietzsche side steps evolutionary logic and speaks of metamorphosis: In the first, the ‘spirit’ changes into ‘the load bearing camel who feeds on the grass of knowledge.’ The camel is a symbol of obedience: ‘thou shalt.’ The camel then changes into the lion, a symbol of strength and ‘lordship.’ He represents the spirit of ‘I will.’ In the third metamorphosis, the lion is transformed into the child:
‘Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea... its own will.’ ( Nietzsche,p.39)
The child signifies affirmation and the coming superman. This is the first statement of the core concept of the book: the will to power. Swami Vivekananda views egoism as imprisonment:
‘The admantine wall that shuts us in is egoism; we refer everything to ourselves, thinking, “I do this, that and the other.” Get rid of this puny “I”... “Not I, but Thou” – say it, feel it, live it...To give up the world is to forget the ego, to know it not at all – living in the body, but not of it. This rascal ego must be obliterated.’ [2]
The ‘I’ is anything but sacred. Only a few of us can aspire to or achieve Swami Vivekananda's ideal ‘Thou.’ He is adamant that we must hold on to the highest ideals even if we struggle, falter and fail.
The narrative of Thus Spake Zarathustra is sketchy. The first person whom Zarathustra meets when he comes down from his solitary mountain is an old hermit clinging to God. Here comes the most quoted line from the book ‘Can it be that he does not know God is dead?’ And a little later ‘God is dead, I teach you the superman.’ The phrase ‘God is dead’ is very dramatic and caught the imagination of Europe and North America. It was first used by Hegel:
‘The highest divestment of the Divine idea ...is expressed in a Lutheran hymn as follows: ‘God has died, God himself is dead.’[3]
An incarnation of God has human as well as divine attributes. Both are true. When Jesus was crucified, he died as a human being. The belief in the resurrection of Jesus is a critical element in traditional Christianity. This is a mark of his divinity. With the rise of science and rational thinking, beliefs in creationism and an afterlife which are central to dualistic religions were rejected. Thus God is dead both as body and spirit. This creates what Hegel calls ‘the unhappy consciousness’:
”...This hard saying (that ‘God is dead’) is the expression of innermost simple self-knowledge, the return of consciousness (i.e. of an object) into the depths of the night in which “I=I”, a night which no longer distinguishes or knows anything outside of it. This (painful) feeling is, in truth, the loss of substance (God)...”[4]
There is never going to be any light at the end of the tunnel except the light of a rational dialectical reality. In his Encyclopaedia of logic (194), Hegel explains the significance of Christ:
“In the Christian religion, God becomes known as love, precisely because he revealed himself to man in his Son, who is one with him, he revealed himself as this single man, and redeemed mankind by doing that. What this also means is that the antithesis of objectivity and subjectivity is overcome implicitly; it is our business to participate in this redemption by laying aside our immediate subjectivity (putting off the old Adam) and becoming conscious of God as our own true and essential Self” [5]
Is Hegel shifting the idea of divinity from a God in heaven, outside us to a God inside the core of our being as in Vedanta? Generally, Hegel’s ideas are associated with totalitarian thought – both fascist and communist. His dialectic is a key element of Marxist ideology, as is the Feuerbach thesis that it is man who creates God. The holy family is sacred because we value the earthly family. The idea of God is a personification of the highest human ideals. Thus God gets relocated inside humanity without His divine attributes. Swami Vivekananda expresses an idea similar to Feuerbach’s radical materialism:
”We see this universe as human beings, and our God is our human explanation of the universe. Suppose a cow were philosophical and had religion, it would have a cow universe, and a cow solution of the problem, and it would not be possible that it should see our God. Suppose cats became philosophers, they would see a cat universe and have a cat solution of the problem of the universe, and a cat ruling it.” (2.155)
The critical difference is that Feuerbach is rooted in humanism, the Marxist view is atheistic. Swami Vivekananda deifies everything so that the worm that crawls under our feet becomes divine.
Commenting on creationism or the concept of God as the creator of the universe, Swami Vivekananda says:
‘...If there is a God, that God must be both the material and the efficient cause of the universe. Not only is He the creator, but He is also the created. He Himself is this universe.’(2.248)
And again:
‘The ancient sages penetrated deeper and deeper until they found that in the innermost core of the human soul is the centre of the whole universe... That is the common ground, and standing there alone can we find a common solution. So the question who made this world is not very philosophical, nor does its solution amount to anything.’ (2.157)
Swami Vivekananda uses the analogy of the banyan tree to illustrate our oneness with God:
‘He is that Banyan tree; He is the root of all and has branched out until He has become this universe, and however far He extends, every one of these trunks and branches is connected.’ (2.183-184)
“...Where to find Him in the external world, where to find Him in the suns, and moons, and stars? There the sun cannot illumine, nor the moon, nor the stars; the flash of lightening cannot illumine the place; what to speak of this mortal fire? He shining, everything else shines. It is His light that they have borrowed, and He is shining through them.” (2.183)
The bottom line is that if God is dead, so are we. If He does not exist, neither does the self-evident ‘I’. Dualism, secular or spiritual is an early stage in religion or mental evolution when compared to the Advaitic idea of truth. In Swami Vivekananda’s view, it is man who becomes divine, becomes God. In a monistic system of thought, the man who achieves perfection like Buddha or Christ becomes God. So if there is a ‘superman’ who can transcend human frailty, he is in the process of becoming God. Swami Vivekananda’s familiar parable of the sheep lion expresses this beautifully. (2.86-87) each one of us starts as a sheep lion. Every soul is potentially divine. Life is a struggle to manifest our divinity through work, worship, mysticism or knowledge.
“Men are taught from childhood that they are weak and sinners. Teach them that they are all glorious children of immortality, even those who are the weakest in manifestation.” (2.87)
It is a matter of opening our eyes, looking at our real selves and realizing who we are: “He that is the Essence of your soul, He is the Truth, He is the Self, Thou art That, O Shvetketu.” (2.134) For Swami Vivekananda, there is just one infinite existence and we are all part of it. It is not a question of ‘becoming’. We are that being already. We need to cut our way out of nature to Eternal Bliss:
“Thou sun, who hast covered the Truth with thy golden disc, do thou remove the veil, so that I may see the Truth that is within thee. I have known the Truth that is within thee, I have known what is the real meaning of thy rays and thy glory and have seen That which shines in thee; the Truth in thee I see, and That which is within thee is within me, and I am That.” (2.154)
[1] Nietzsche, Friedrich (2009), Thus Spake Zarathushtra,(Mumbai: Wilco press).For an analysis of Plato's cave, please see; Davidson,Pramila;"Plato's Allegory of the Cave:a Vedantic Reading,Prabuddha Bharata"Vol.114,No.8,August 2009 and Davidson, Pramila;"Aspects of Western Philosophy and Swami Vivekananda,Prabuddha Bharata,Vol.117, No.4, April 2012.
[2] Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 9 vols., (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1-8, 1989: 9, 1997
[3] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, (2008)” The Consummate Religion,” Lectures on Philosophy of Religion, Vol. III, (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Trans. Robert F. Brown, Peter C. Hodgson and J Michael Stewart, p. 125
[4] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, (1807) Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (1977), (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 476
[5] Hegel, G.W.F.,(1991) The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part 1 of The Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusatze, trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchhting, H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett), p. 273
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