The Resurrection of Christ as Eternal Return

"And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched." (Mark 9:43).

With "the body of Christ," Christianity has universalized its body. The appearance of the man-God in Jesus Christ refutes the dualism of body and spirit, "City of God" and the cities of men. All is flesh and flesh is divine, all is divine and the divine is embodied, and through the divine flesh of the One resides the Holy Spirit. The "Trinity" is the destroyer of worlds, what once found unity in its dualism is now shattered into an absolute union.

With "the body of Christ," Christianity has universalized its body. Yet, in the minds of men this body is too quick to "offend," and they are too quick to "cut it off." "The consequence is, unfortunately, not only the loss of an organ but the emasculation of a man's character...only the castrated man is a good man." (F. Nietzsche). First, perhaps the "emasculation," but now certainly the re-masculation. For a society constructed around the perspective of men cannot exist without men. Now the "castrated man" is not just the "good man," but he is the essential man through whose eyes all those who are not men are forced to the margins. These marginal not men are then threatened with social castration as the universal body prepares to "cut off" the parts which "offend thee."

With "the body of Christ," Christianity has universalized its body! Now the body must be repeatedly crucified in order to preserve our redemption...

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

I am about halfway through Walter Kaufmann's seminal study of Nietzsche entitled Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, and I came across a very interesting comparison between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.

"[Nietzsche] could not follow Schelling and Kierkegaard in accepting an entire revealed religion on faith. Nietzsche's fundamental attitude and method barred him from this course: for Kierkegaard not only failed to question an incidental premise but abandoned philosophy altogether to 'leap'-- as he himself put it-- into religion."
(Kaufmann 125).

Perhaps I should say something quickly about what Kaufmann is referring to by Nietzsche's "method." Nietzsche criticized philosophical systems and systematizing philosophers because he believed all systems relied on unquestioned premises. This is part of what he is getting at in many points where he refers to systems as the "ego" of the philosopher. What a philosophical system is, at bottom, is a betrayal of the biases or needs of the philosopher constructing it (this is similar to the "center" of structures). The truth value of these premises cannot be established within the system itself. Instead they must be ignored, or "lept over" as Kierkegaard suggests.

When these premises are removed we are faced with a massive gap in the system, you can call this gap "absurdity" if you like. Nietzsche's method was to question every premises, "to look out of this window, now out of that." It is a perspectivist approach that relies on accumulating many perspectives, and, where necessary, allowing your "will to truth" overpower your need for comfort by facing the absurd. That is a very incomplete re-hash, and I have skipped over the role of dialectics, which is rather important, but I think it suffices for the time being.

Nietzsche's response to this kind of Kierkegaardian "leap" was made without being acquainted with the particular philosophy of Kierkegaard:

"Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want any more: this created all gods and other worlds."
(Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra).

Wow! Maybe I just need to get out more (ok, we all know I need to get out more), but isn't it great when two thinkers seem to speak to each other without knowing it. In any case, this is a problem of fundamental importance to me. Is it "poor ignorant weariness" that causes people to make these leaps? Is it perhaps that our minds are designed in such a way that we cannot deal with absurdity, or spaciousness? Perhaps we have just been taught and brought up in a manner where we refuse to see, or cannot see, the possibility of the absurd? In other places Nietzsche seems to attribute this move to a lack of intellectual integrity, and in others, to a psychological need for comfort.

Here is the real question I was struck with after reading this section: could it not require immense courage to make this leap? Maybe it is weariness on Nietzsche's part, or panic even, that leaves him on one bank denying the existence of the other. In my study of Nietzsche up to this point, and its really just beginning, I find myself asking, and often out loud, "what would you have us do Friedrich?" Am I just asking him to sprout wings and carry me across?

Systems Theory

Not sure how easy this is to follow but out of context, but here goes:

Let us rephrase our question one last time. "What can we say we see?" might mean: Is there one single, accurate description of the world? Encore: Is the/a "correct" description of the world necessary, or necessarily contingent? The law of excluded middle demands an unequivocal answer: "Yes" (necessary) or "No" (contingent). Quine attempts to occupy that excluded middle ground and answers "Yo." But one can see that such an answer "sides," so to speak, with the original "No," for in accepting the relative validity of both positions, it denies the exclusivity demanded by the affirmation of necessity. And yet, though this middle position sides with the negative answer by excluding ultimate exclusion, it is not identical to it. In opting for "ontological relativity" (Quine 1969), one does not simply observe contingency as one might observe objects; rather, one presupposes contingency as an irreducible value. Put another way, if one can entertain competing descriptions of the world as incommensurable but equally valid, one does so not from a position that can see the adequacy of each position but rather from a position that posits the necessity of competing contingent descriptions. In a world where descriptions proliferate and faith in the authority of reason has gone the way of faith in the authority of God, contingency becomes the transcendental placeholder. "Modernity" is the name we have given to this necessarily contingent world.

--William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann's Modernity

Very interesting to compare the idea of occupying the middle ground with Heidegger's "ontological difference" and Vattimo's "interval" (which is exactly what I'm doing in a paper).

But does the "siding," as Rasch puts it, with contingency reveal the hidden transcendent (thus, impossible) point of view of systems theory? It would seem the validity of the theory would depend on the answer to that question--a question that is in addition enormously difficult to even think about, let alone answer. Can you posit contingency as "infinite" without immediately putting a limit on it by the very statement? It would seem that according to Luhmann this is a necessary pragmatic act as well as an unavoidable theoretical one.