Nietzsche and traditionalism? (The will to power and God?)

[BillHopkins]

Nature, mystery, ethnic solidarity, will to power - revering these things is revering God.  Metal is a different conception of God.

Nietzsche's idea of 'the will to power' formed the basis of his 'metaphysics' or ontology (view about what exists).

A big part of this theory was applied by Nietzsche to come to the idea that your morality, aesthetic tastes, and those parts of realty you decide to pick out and call truths at the expense of other aspects (this isn't relativism, it's perspectivalism) are a reflection of your dialectical position in the whole... your will to power.

Weak people choose chritianity because it advocates love and compassion for the weak (antichrist)
Human beings like tragic art such as Beethoven or greek plays because it stimulates the will in the face of nihilsim and meaininglessness of life (birth of tragedy)
People who don't have much virility becomes scientists because they feel more comfortable being 'objective' and simply acting as passive mirror on reality than as a 'first cause' (beyond good & Evil)
etc.

How, then, do you reconcile the will to power with 'God', the latter being a notion that refers to something fixed, timeless and trascendent? 'God', for Nietzsche, must be a product of the will to power. God, then, must be an idea that reflects the position of a certain organism in the whole, for dialectical purposes. (This is not to discount the concept of 'God'. I'm not suggesting God is purely an invention of weak people, there are other dialectical uses of God no doubt: transcendence, purpose, political reasons. I'm suggesting God is purely an invention of a certian kind of organism, and that if we had been a different kind or organism, then we would have a different conception of God, or no conception at all).

[lafindumonde]

I believe a common atheist argument is that the popular conception of God is clearly a biased projection of "super monkey who protects the weak" onto the cosmos. This is the Christianity that black metal-ists hate - desperately clinging to the necessity of humans.

Popular Judeo-Christianity superficially placed humans slightly below God, but this is only a ploy. God is shown to derive his importance in relation to humans. Everything is human-centric - Judaic moralism, the subjugation of nature and other peoples to a chosen ethnicity. Expand that to "all humans" and we have an even worse problem. All nature must die to support billions, because humanity is of core importance before and above anything and everything - especially the weakest among us (inverting nature!).

My inclination is to seek God in the cosmos and seek humanity's importance only in relation to nature and the cosmos. To reintegrate humanity into everything which it was mistakenly removed from.

What then is transcendence? Is Christianity just a mistake and broken pursuit of transcendence - thinking that simply by placing nature "below" humanity on a slave's moral scale that we somehow transcend it? Is Christianity nothing more than a slave's attempt to seek higher meaning? If this is wrong then what really is transcendence and God?

[BillHopkins]

I don't think that christianity is nothing more than slave morality. But if you are into Nietzsche's will to power as a philosophical idea, then all 'religion', or spirituality, becomes...art, if you will. Art created by an organism with a specific form of life, which would take a different form if the organism was different, i.e. placed differently in the whole.

But, like you ask, what really is transcendence then. It is certainly not what Perennialists take it to be, metaphysically speaking. It still might be valuable, however.

(Note: this is not to reduce Nietzsche to a post-modernist philosopher. Nietzsche was, in my opnion, definetely a quasi-essentialist thinker. He wasn't an existensialist, believing that 'exstence preceeds essence' (i.e. a non-essentialist). Something preceeds existence for N: something grounds man and man bumps up and measures himself against something. However, the 'essence' for N is the will to power. Something we cannot know in advance, and so unlike a clearly existing anthropomorphic 'God'. The will to power is a field of force of shifting relations, based on turmoil, conflict, violence and becoming. (perhaps not unlike the view modern physicists hold? Another quesiton altogether).

[Cargést]

Will to Power is Nietzsche's God, in your take on his works.

[BillHopkins]

Will to Power is Nietzsche's God, in your take on his works.

Not exactly. The will to power is Nietzsche's ontology. When the nature of this ontology is understood it makes the reason why one venerates the particular kind of God (or moral/art/ideal) that he does intelligable.

I know what you mean though, the will to power is the ultimate reality for Nietzsche. Kant's 'noumenal realm'.

[lost_wanderer]

There's two ways to live. Or two gods to worship. The way of the Will, linked in the realm of dreams and desires, or the way of the non-will, where you let yourself to the flow of Life and live it where it takes you. It's the mysterious path.  Wich will you choose?

[crow]

Jesus was no more, no less, than an enlightened soul.
Other men used his name to make something else of him.
Other men defined God, for their own purposes.
These other men, I suspect, had no clear idea of what they were messing with.
Other men never do.

There is only one person that can ever 'know' the reality.
You.
You don't read it, learn it, or get told it.
You get on with the business of living, to the best of your ability.
And you discover, little by little, what the truth is.

[Jim Necroslaughter]

I conceive of God as a sort of "form of all possible forms."

[WAAAAAAGH!]

Jim that sounds a lot like Aquinas.