“In what sense is joy deeper than woe ? I think that this song refers to some underlying structure of basic human feeling, maybe will to power. it is as if drive or emotion in the state of joy DEMANDS it’s eternity and thus it would be rational for YOU to want woe too, for how many joy would be lost if there were no woe! what do you think?”
I’ve had a lot of thoughts on this, and in fact I treated it at length in my Dutch videos… Here’s some pointers:
In “The Nightwanderer’s Song”, Zarathustra says:
“Just now hath my world become perfect, midnight is also mid-day,–
Pain is also a joy [Lust], curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun,–go away! or ye will learn that a sage is also a fool.” (section 10, Common translation (“The Drunken Song”))
Note that he does not say: “mid-day is also midnight”, “joy is also a pain”, etc. (By the way, the word translated as “mid-day” is often translated as “noon”, as in “the great noon”.) Compare:
“It has often been remarked that, while the prephilosophic term for the whole [to holon, “the universe”] is ‘heaven and earth’, the philosophers call it kosmos, an ordered composite whose structure is intelligible only to the mind but is not apparent to the eye, which cannot go beyond its two most conspicuous parts. There is ‘day and night’, and there is ‘day’, which comprehends both day and night and can no longer be seen.” (Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre, page 86-7.)
We could also say: there is “night and day”, and there is “night”, which comprehends both night and day and can no longer be seen. Let’s see if we can interpret Zarathustra this way. Joy is deeper than woe because it comprehends both “joy and woe”. Pain is also a joy, but joy is not also a pain. The positive comprehends the negative: a curse (negative) is also a blessing (positive). Go away, or you will learn that the fool, not the sage, is the positive one of the two.
“Every basic character trait that is encountered at the bottom of every event, that finds expression in every event, would¹ have to lead the individual who experienced it as his own basic character trait to welcome every moment of universal experience with a sense of triumph. The crucial point would be that one experienced this basic character trait in oneself as good, valuable–with pleasure [Lust].” (WP 55.)
The basic character trait that Nietzsche suggests is the will to power. Pleasure is the feeling of power, and the feeling of power is at bottom the feeling of freedom, the feeling of will (cf. GM 2.18). The pathos of free will to power… Strong passion (cf. EH Z 3).
¹ In order to make pantheism in Nietzsche’s sense possible.
By the way, I now think Nietzsche’s teaching is not the European form of Buddhism (cf. WP 55), but of Vedanta: the ring of recurrence is the Atman of Vedanta (and the Precious from Tolkien), not the Anatta of Buddhism. Yet the two are one and the same: the ER is a subtle time-fetish, a symbol of the Infinite (Ananta Brahman) beyond it.
There is a joy beyond the “joy and woe” of the ego: the joy of the Self. Compare Z “Despisers of the Body” and BGE 225. The only good reason to be attached to your body is that it makes the “out-of-body experience” of non-attachment possible.
“One will see that in this book pessimism, or to speak more clearly, nihilism, counts as ‘truth’. But truth does not count as the supreme value, even less as the supreme power. The will to appearance, to illusion, to deception, to becoming and change (to objective deception) here counts as more profound, primeval, ‘metaphysical’ than the will to truth, to reality, to being:–the last is itself merely a form of the will to illusion. In the same way, pleasure counts as being more primeval than pain: pain only as conditioned, as a consequence of the will to pleasure (of the will to become, grow, shape, i.e., to create: in creation, however, destruction is included). A highest state of affirmation of existence is conceived from which the highest degree of pain cannot be excluded: the tragic-Dionysian state.” (WP 853.)
The Reason to be attached is that the truth is pleasurable, in the sense of “pleasure” that comprehends both “pleasure and pain”. Nietzsche’s glad tidings are that the world is the will to power and nothing besides, i.e., the “will to art, to lie, to flight from ‘truth’, to negation of ‘truth’.” (WP 853.) The truth comprehends both “truth and art”. Note that BT 18 gives, as its example of a tragic culture, “Buddhist culture” (which Nietzsche in his 1886 copy of the book changed to “Indian (Brahmanic) culture”). Osho spoke of Zorba the Buddha. We should think of Dionysus the Bodhisattva: going down, not out of compassion, but out of conjoylessness!
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