Interlude XVI. Nietzsche - part 5

Prometheus + Indian Summer

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XV. Nietzsche - part 4

From The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche...

Sec 9 - The Aryan myth of Prometheus vs the Semitic myth of the fall

The presupposition of the Prometheus myth is to be found in the extravagant value which a naive humanity attached to fire as the true palladium of every ascending culture. But that man should freely dispose of fire without receiving it as a present from heaven... struck those reflective primitive men as sacrilege, as a robbery of divine nature... The best and highest possession mankind can acquire is obtained by sacrilege and must be paid for with consequences that involve the whole flood of sufferings and sorrows with which the offended divinities have to afflict the nobly aspiring race of men... What distinguishes the Aryan notion is the sublime view of active sin as the characteristically Promethean virtue. With that, the ethical basis for pessimistic tragedy has been found; the justification of human evil, meaning both human guilt and the human suffering it entails.

In the heroic effort of the individual to attain universality, in the attempt to transcend the curse of individuation and to become the one world-being, he suffers in his own person the primordial contradiction that is concealed in things, which means that he commits sacrilege and suffers.

So in the middle of this ongoing discussion of the Apollinian and Dionysian, Nietzsche suddenly goes off on the Promethean. This starts with Aeschylus’s Prometheus but quickly turns to Goethe’s Prometheus with a quote from the lovely ending of that poem where Prometheus refers to Zeus or the Olympian gods in general:

Here I sit, forming men

in my own image,

a race to be like me,

to suffer, to weep,

to delight and to rejoice,

and to defy you,

as I do.

This got me questioning my knowledge of the Prometheus myth, so I did a little research and no wonder I was confused. And it gets even more complicated when those damn Romantics get involved. Prometheus is either a Titan or, for people who want to emphasize his similarity with Christ, a son of Zeus. He either creates man out of clay or men are created by the Olympian gods and he only breathes life into them. Or he merely gives them fire, though what exactly is meant by “fire” is also open to interpretation.

Aside from the people who wish to see in his perpetual suffering a Christlike figure -- bound to the rock with the eagle (or Byron would make it a vulture) eating his liver every day in punishment for his giving fire to man, for most he is an equivalent of Lucifer giving men precisely what the gods don’t want them to have. (It is also worth noting that "Lucifer" supposedly means "light bearer" or, as an adjective, "light-bringing" in Hebrew.)

I can’t help wondering how Goethe compared Prometheus with Lucifer or his own Mephistopheles. Giving man either fire or the "divine spark" is interesting for a number of reasons. Either can be viewed as what separate man from nature. Fire, what the Greeks understood by the term, but also the highly problematic industrial and modern fires of coal (which Goethe viewed with alarm), oil, and fission, are what give us the ability to desecrate our world. Goethe was critical of the un-natural power over the earth that Mephisto gave to Faust and also of the Faustian desire to change or improve nature. So does he view Prometheus with the same jaundiced eye?

And then there’s the other thing, the divine spark. That which makes us conscious of ourselves and of our separation from nature. For the Greeks this quality was laid at Prometheus’s door. Milton, and Christianity, would give the credit or blame to Lucifer, for what is the knowledge of good and evil that got Adam and Eve kicked out of Eden but the consciousness or belief that acts have a moral value -- something that doesn’t exist in nature. (To realize just how amoral nature is you can read Sallie Tisdale’s “The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies,” included in the book The Inevitable by David Shields, or Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim At Tinker Creek.)

Is Prometheus really the Friend of Man he has been made out to be? Or, like Lucifer, can he also be seen as man’s greatest enemy? Prometheus and Lucifer are the ones who cut us off from the oneness -- or at least the unself- consciousness -- of creation. Nietzsche claims that the Greeks invented the Olympian gods and placed them (more or less) in the world so that we would not be overwhelmed by despair. If the gods love and fight and procreate then life must be good enough for us, too. But couldn’t you then also see Zeus as punishing Prometheus in man’s behalf for the questionable gifts he inflicted on us? Do the Olympian gods exist for us to get our revenge?

Prometheus from Wiki:

In his book written in 1476-77 titled Quaestiones Quinque de Mente, Ficino indicates his preference for reading the Prometheus myth as an image of the human soul seeking to obtain supreme truth. As Olga Raggio summarizes Ficino's text, "The torture of Prometheus is the torment brought by reason itself to man, who is made by it many times more unhappy than the brutes. It is after having stolen one beam of the celestial light [...] that the soul feels as if fastened by chains and [...] only death can release her bonds and carry her to the source of all knowledge."[64] This somberness of attitude in Ficino's text would be further developed later by Charles de Bouelles' Liber de Sapiente of 1509 which presented a mix of both scholastic and Neoplatonic ideas.

For the Romantic era, Prometheus was the rebel who resisted all forms of institutional tyranny epitomized by Zeus — church, monarch, and patriarch. The Romantics drew comparisons between Prometheus and the spirit of the French Revolution, Christ, the Satan of John Milton's Paradise Lost, and the divinely inspired poet or artist. Prometheus is the lyrical "I" who speaks in Goethe's Sturm und Drang poem "Prometheus" (written c. 1772–74, published 1789), addressing God (as Zeus) in misotheist accusation and defiance.

Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein is subtitled "The Modern Prometheus", in reference to the novel's themes of the over-reaching of modern humanity into dangerous areas of knowledge.

Prometheus is the creative and rebellious spirit rejected by God, and who angrily defies him and asserts himself; Ganymede, by direct contrast, is the boyish self who is both adored and seduced by God. As a high Romantic poet and a humanist poet, Goethe presents both identities as contrasting aspects of the Romantic human condition.

"Goethe's Prometheus had Zeus for father and a goddess for mother. With this change from the traditional lineage the poet distinguished his hero from the race of the Titans." For Goethe, the metaphorical comparison of Prometheus to the image of the Son from the New Testament narratives was of central importance, with the figure of Zeus in Goethe's reading being metaphorically matched directly to the image of the Father from the New Testament narratives.

In his 1952 book, Lucifer and Prometheus, Zvi Werblowsky presented the speculatively derived Jungian construction of the character of Satan in Milton's celebrated poem Paradise Lost. Werblowsky applied his own Jungian style of interpretation to appropriate parts of the Prometheus myth for the purpose of interpreting Milton. A reprint of his book in the 1990s by Routledge Press included an introduction to the book by Carl Jung. Some Gnostics have been associated with identifying the theft of fire from heaven as embodied by the fall of Lucifer "the Light Bearer".

Indian Summer.

Our Indian Summer continues. The weather is perfect and I’ve been sitting often at my table overlooking the garden with the doors thrown open. Every day there seems to be a little more red at the top of the Japanese maple tree, and just this week I’ve noticed a bare branch or two up there as well. But what really catches the eye are the hummingbirds. I don’t associate them with this season, but they’ve been zooming all over the place, harvesting the last of this year’s nectar I suppose.

I said before that swallows are the bird I most like to watch in flight, and I am sticking to that, while giving an honorable mention to hawks hovering nearly motionless above a ridge or tall building. Hummingbirds seem to violate all the rules of flight. They are more like bumblebees than other birds. And while bumblebees are my favorite bees (or insects, for that matter) hummingbirds, for all their virtuosity and outrageousness, are not as graceful as the swooping sparrow. But they are exciting to watch.

A new restaurant has opened up near me called “Game.” As a vegetarian, I haven’t even bothered to study their menu, but I imagine (my head cannon) it consists, in best locavore tradition, of squab, rat-on-a-stick, and roast raccoon. Perhaps sea-lion steaks in season. While concocting this menu I found myself wondering if I would make an exception for locally caught pigeons -- do I hate them enough to violate my moral standards to support the thinning of their numbers? I’m not sure, to be frank.

Even pigeons are amazing fliers. Next time you are watching some nasty pigeons in flight, contrast their antics with the best of human heavier-than-air technology. They leave the most nimble helicopter or drone in the dust when they land on window ledges or weave between branches or wires. If I were an aeronautical engineer I think I would probably hate them... more than I already do, I mean.


Next: Interlude XVII. Nietzsche - part 6.