Abstract
In this chapter, ‘Nietzsche in Liber Novus’, I will explore Nietzsche’s presence in Liber Novus through a philological analysis of the text. When needed, I will make use of Jungʼs annotations on his own copy of Zarathustra, often referring to Liber Novus indeed. In the first half of the chapter, I will investigate Nietzsche’s ‘implicit’ presence in Liber Novus, always occurring in the layer of Jung’s retrospective comments on his fantasies. I will dwell upon three symbolic constellations: desert, lion, and transformation; poisonous serpents, riddles, and dwarfs; sun, sunset, and eastern wisdom. In the second half of the chapter, I will explore Nietzscheʼs ‘explicit’ presence in Liber Novus, occurring in both layers of fantasies and retrospective comments, always after January 1914. The symbolic constellations analysed will be: folly as the other side of life; teaching, mocking, and imitating in the process of self-becoming; death and rebirth of God.
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Notes
- 1.
The other three quotations from the Bible are: ‘Isaiah said: Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted’ (Isaiah 53: 1–4); ‘For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6)’; ‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we be held his glory; the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth (John 1:14)’.
- 2.
Interestingly, Paul Bourget makes use of this novel, and precisely of the character of St Anthony, in order to explain Flaubert’s psychology in terms of ‘decadence’. The stress on an intellectual image of ‘reality’, ‘feelings’, and ‘sensations’, before ‘reality’, ‘feelings’, and ‘sensations’ on their own, mirrors the central role of thinking. The temptation would represent indeed a desire to become one with ‘matter’, which would perfectly contrast such intellectualism, showing the ‘disproportion’, typical of the decadence (Bourget 1883: 111–173).
- 3.
Eigentlich um nun die gewonnene Einsicht in die menschliche Natur wirklich zu leben und nicht bloss zu denken. Daraus würde ein Kampf mit den Löwen entstehen und aus seiner Überwindung würde der puer aeternus, eben das Kind entstehen. Das fällt aber schon in die Krankheit.
- 4.
The ‘swamp water’ [Sumpfwasser] was already mentioned in Jung’s comment on his fantasy from the chapter ‘One of the Lowly’ (29 December 1913) (RB II, 3: 266).
- 5.
Some lines above, Jung had presumably already referred to Nietzsche by writing: ‘the disgust of whoever wants to enter into his own life can hardly be measured. Aversion will sicken him. He makes him self vomit’.
- 6.
On the role of the ass in Zarathustra, IV, with particular regard to its religious meaning and tradition, see Salaquarda (1973).
- 7.
Another reference to Wagner in Liber Novus is given by the unusual representation of Parsifal after the asylum episode in ‘Nox Quarta’, Liber Secundus (RB II, 17: 302–303). Besides, the sacrifice of Siegfried in ‘Murder of the Hero’, Liber Primus, might be also linked to Wagner and his Ring (RB I, 7: 241–242).
- 8.
In the chapter ‘Death’, Jung also experiences unindifferentiation and values overturn. He will later understand these in regard to the approaching of the First World War and the North-European situation in general. It is also interesting to notice, to this end, that after accepting ‘death’ as a condition of life, the ‘red sun’ rises again (RB II, 6: 273–275).
- 9.
Philo of Alexandria (also called Philo Judaeus) brought Jewish elements into Greek philosophy. In particular, Jung referred to him in a letter to James Kirsch: ‘The gnosis from which John the Evangelist emanated, is definitely Jewish, but its essence is Hellenistic, in the style of Philo Judaeus, the founder of the teachings of the Logos’ (Jung Archives, cited in Shamdasani 2009, RB II, 4: 268). Regarding the character of Ammonius, Jung wrote that he came from the third century (letter from 31 December 1913; Jung’s Family Archives). As pointed out by Sonu Shamdasani, ‘there are three historical figures named Ammonius in Alexandria from this period: Ammonius, a Christian philosopher in the third century, once thought to have been responsible for the medieval divisions of the gospels; Ammonius Cetus, who was born a Christian but turned to Greek philosophy and whose work presents a transition from Platonism to Neoplatonism; a Neoplatonic Ammonius in the fifth century, who tried to reconcile Aristotle and the Bible. At Alexandria, there was accommodation between Neoplatonism and Christianity, and some of the pupils of the latter Ammonius converted to Christianity’ (ibid.: 267).
- 10.
According to Ammonius, ‘a succession of words does not have only one meaning. But men strive to assign only a single meaning to the sequence of words, in order to have an unambiguous language. This striving is worldly and constricted, and belongs to the deepest layers of the divine creative plan. On the higher levels of insight into divine thoughts, you recognize that the sequence of words has more than one valid meaning. Only to the all-knowing is it given to know all the meanings of the sequence of words. Increasingly we try to grasp a few more meanings’ (ibid.: 268). It is also interesting to notice that Philo himself is defined by Ammonius as ‘slave of his own words’ (ibid.).
- 11.
- 12.
In this regard, it can be observed that the extreme form of self-mockery is represented by the attitude of the Cynics. Interestingly, Nietzsche takes a similar position in Beyond Good and Evil, § 26, by stating that ‘Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty [Cynismus ist die einzige Form, in welcher gemeine Seelen an Das streifen, was Redlichkeit ist]’ (JGB I, 26, KSA 5: 44; my own translation).
- 13.
Here, Nietzsche describes ‘bad conscience’ [Schlechtes Gewissen] in terms of a moral conduct which judges as wrong—and therefore represses—every human attempt to follow natural instincts (GM II, 16–25, KSA 5: 331–332). According to this definition, ‘slave morality’ would be born together with the necessity of suppressing the instincts from the outer world and turning them towards interiority. In this sense, men are seen as in need of being tamed: ‘that will to self-torment, that repressed cruelty of animal man pushed inward and forced back into himself, imprisoned in the “state” to make him tame [zum Zweck der Zähmung], who invented bad conscience in order to lacerate himself, after the more natural discharge of this will to inflict pain had been blocked—this man of bad conscience seized upon religious assumptions to drive his self-torment to its most horrifying hardship and ferocity’ (ibid.: 22; with the same meaning, Zähmung appears also in GM III, 13, KSA 5: 365). The reference to this text occurs again twice in the same section from Liber Novus. Once, still referring to himself, Jung uses the word ‘slaves’ [Sklaven] (RB Scrutinies, 1: 334). Just a few pages further on, Christian morality is said to be ‘for burden’ (ibid.: 337), recalling again not only the same distinction between slaves’ and masters’ moral, but also Zarathustra—with particular regard to ‘Of The Three Metamorphoses’ and the camel.
- 14.
One can think, for instance, of the well-known picture of Nietzsche, Paul Ree, and Lou von Salomé, taken in Lucerne in 1882, in which the three of them are on a carriage and Lou is holding a whip, pretending to hit her friends.
- 15.
References to a kind of virtue that enlightens similarly to stars is to be found in the chapter ‘Of the Virtuous’, too, precisely in relation to the sentence ‘your virtue is your dearest friend’ (KSA 4: 121).
- 16.
Such understanding of the divine might be also read in opposition to Karl Barth’s theology. Although never openly exhibited, Jung and Barth showed their mutual disagreements in a few occasions (Jehle-Wildberger 2014: Introduction).
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Domenici, G. (2019). Nietzsche in Liber Novus. In: Jung's Nietzsche . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17670-9_3
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