F.
Nietzsche's Antichrist and R. Wright's God
Rereading Friedrich Nietzsche's The Will To Power and The Antichrist: A Criticism of Christianity
and Richard Wright's The Outsider and "Man, God Ain't
Like That…" amplify a sense of dread.
Ὠ The
Will…segment 1012:
He who urges
rational thought forward, thereby also drives its antagonistic power
---mysticism and foolery of every kind ---to new feats of strength.
We should
recognise that every movement is (1) partly
the manifestation of fatigue resulting from a previous movement (satiety
after it, the malice of weakness towards it, and disease); and (2) partly a newly awakened accumulation of
long slumbering forces, and therefore wanton, violent, healthy.
# The Antichrist,
Part 16:
"……A man is grateful for his own existence; for this
he must have a God. Such a God must be
able to benefit and to injure him, he must be able to act the friend and the
foe. He must be esteemed for his good as
well as his evil qualities. The
monstrous castration of a God by making him a God only of goodness, would lie
beyond the pale of the desires of such a community. The evil God is just as urgently needed as
the good God: for a people in such a as form of society certainly does not owe
its existence to toleration and humaneness…What would be the good of a God who
knew nothing of anger, revenge, envy, scorn, craft, and violence?"
@ The Outsider,
Book Five: Decision
Cross Damon tutors Ely Houston: "…I've lived alone, but I'm
everywhere…Man is returning to the earth…For a long time he has been sleeping,
wrapped in a dream…He is awakening now, awakening from his dreams and finding
himself in a waking nightmare…The myth-men are going…The real men, the last men
are coming…Somebody must prepare the way for them…Tell the world what they are
like…We are here already, if others but had the courage to see us…"
# "Man, God Ain't Like That…":
"-----You test Babu like you test Jew that
time. Jew, he no believe. White man kill you and prove you God. Then you rose from dead in three days and you
make white man powerful. Now it's black man's turn!"
In Richard Wright:
Books & Writers, Michel Fabre noted Wright bought The Antichrist and The Will To Power sometime after 1940, quoted Nietzsche in The Outsider, Savage Holiday, Pagan Spain, Black Power and White Man, Listen!, and considered him to be a prophet "whose
questions are actual and everlasting."
The important word is "prophet." Nietzsche and Wright can be thought of as
secular heirs of Jeremiah, descendents who castigate our contemporary vanity of
vanities. Although Wright found the
tragic sense of desperation in a book he purchased on June 11, 1945, Sǿren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Dread, it is through his blending of Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche and Black vernacular existentialism that his legacy haunts us as does
Nietzsche's unsurpassed meditations on the Absurd. As we try to identify our
locations in the time and space of ideas, reading Nietzsche and Wright is quintessential.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. February 10, 2017
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