My Borges' vision of Marx

The Circular Ruins is one of my favorite short stories by Borges. I don’t have an academic degree in literature, so what I’m about to say might have already been said before, but if that’s the case, I’m unaware of it.

I think that The Circular Ruins is a metaphor of Marxism. It came to my mind the first time I read it years ago, and it happened to me again this time. Of its own story Borges said that “everything is unreal” (Fictions, prologue, 1941). He might have been frank with this three-word introduction, but I think there is much more of it.

The argument of the story is that the wise man, or magician, that comes to live in the circular ruins wants to “dream a man: he wanted to dream him with thorough integrity and impose him on reality.” He even says that “the purpose that guided him was not impossible, though supernatural.” The rest of the story is the struggle of this wise man to create inside his dreams a perfect human being. In order to achieve it, he practices various strategies that do not work so well at the beginning, and ends up asking the help of supernatural beings, or gods. At first it seems to be a completely fantastic story, with the usual references to enigmatic problems and descriptions common in Borges writings. But going back to the argument of conceiving a perfect man in order to impose it on reality, I cannot avoid thinking that the wise man is Karl Marx.

Now, Marx was too careful to fall into utopianism, and he thoroughly hated it. The gigantic effort he did to device his immense sociological system of dialectical materialism was an impressive rhetorical narrative to disguise what really is a utopia with the mask of scientific reality, which we can trace as early as his The German Ideology (1846). He knew that the man he was calling for was inexistent during his lifetime, but the vast majority of his thinking consists in proving that the true human condition has the potential to one day become that man, by changing the world in which he lives, hence changing him. This is what fallows logically from dialectical materialism, inherited from Hegel’s dialectic. And this is precisely one of Marx’s major mistakes: he thought that he was conceiving the true material human being, whereas what he was doing was making out of a logical deduction an empirical claim; an obvious fallacy.

To go back to The Circular Ruins, the first device developed by the wise man is to dream an amphitheater full of students to whom he is imparting a lecture. He was “looking a soul that deserved to participate in the universe,” that is someone who legitimately can be imposed on reality, according to the first argument. The purpose was to find out who of those students was the true man he was looking for, by digging in their intellectual abilities. Soon he finds out that they are a crown of uncreative, unintelligent repeaters of his doctrine. The wise man is an eminent professor, a thinker, a philosopher, like Marx. But his doctrine only produces ideologues, like most Marxists. The wise man is disappointed by his followers (like Marx in his late years) and wakes up very distressed.

At this point the story suffers a break in which the wise man must depart temporarily from his mission in order to rest and think it through from the beginning. He realizes how arduous, time consuming and difficult it is to conceive such a man. He takes longer and longer, paying attention to every detail of his body, as detailed and as long as Das Kapital (1867). But when he finishes it, the man won’t wake up. The creation is so unreal that the creature remains unconscious of his potential for living. Just as the 19^th and 20^th centuries saw failed revolutions, because Lenin’s new man wouldn’t be born to start the final revolution of all; the revolution that would impose the new man on reality, making capitalism obsolete and the entrance to the final stage of history, communism, possible.

The wise man gives up and asks the gods for help. He realized that his intellectual quest is supernatural. This is where Marxism reaches its delusional peak, because claiming the ultimate social scientific truth, what they are looking for cannot be naturally reached. So, how can it be scientifically true? It can’t. Marxism must yield to the fact that it has all been a dream, an arbitrary act of imagination, a violent will to make reality the way it wants it to be, and not the way that it simply is. Marxism turns totalitarian. In Arendtian sense, it uses violence to force upon men and reality the form that it wants them to have. This is the horrible true material conclusion of Marxism, and it has the name of Stalin, the truest of all Marxists. However, Marxism today wants to naively reject this claim (for good reasons though).

In the last part of the story, the wise man manages to wake his imaginary man into reality by the help of the god of fire (godly fire is the metaphor for totalitarian violence). His son travels somewhere to other ruins to teach the new doctrine (to disturb other countries politics). One day some travelers tell the wise man that his son has proved to be invulnerable to fire. Of course, he is nothing but a product of imagination, a ghost, an unreal man. The wise man is afraid that his son might realize that truth, hence undermining his life experience and existence. But suddenly a fire breaks around the circular ruins, burning them. When the wise man tries to escape he realizes that fire cannot hurt him. He is also a product of someone else’s imagination. He cannot experience true human suffering. He cannot understand the true human condition. If he would have, he wouldn’t have tried to conceive the perfect man in the first place. Fire, the technology of totalitarianism to create the perfect man, ends up destroying the ruins themselves, and demonstrating the wise man that he has been living a fictitious life. This is the tragic outcome of all the mythical heroes of Marxism, from Trotsky to Che Guevara and beyond.

If Borges didn't mean to make a metaphor of Marxism, at least I find it strikingly similar.

The Paradox of Agnosticism

Agnostics tend to say that their disbelief in God is based on the argument that God's existence cannot be proved. Hence, they usually ask for empirical demonstrations and they even say that on such conditions they are open to believe. I find this reasoning highly problematic and ultimately paradoxical. In few words, I think true agnosticism is impossible.

First, if we conceive (i.e. logically imagine in our minds) something like the Abrahamic God, we come to realize that It cannot exist. Because the requisite for something to exists is an origin or birth, a history and a death. This can be make of pagan deities and idols, who traditionally in mythology have supernatural births, supernatural lives, and even in some cultures, supernatural deaths. They exist because they come into the world, just as human beings. They are not eternal.

Contrariwise, the Abrahamic God of Jews, Christians and Muslims is eternal. Or as it is stated in Revelations 22:13 "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End". God is the philosophical "being" Itself, as when It presents Itself to Moses in Exodus 3:14 by saying "I am that I am." If Gods is something, It is a concept, so It cannot exist. In logical language, It subsists, just like logical concepts. It can only be conceived by us, but not seen by us. This is also summarized by St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:18 when he writes, "So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal". In the same way, concepts are not seen anywhere but conceived in our minds, because they are eternal. Our relation to God works in a very similar fashion, and the act of truly conceiving God is called faith. Just as concepts cannot be empirically demonstrated, God cannot be demonstrated. So the question for God's existence is misleading, and nonsensical.


The question of the being of God is, then, logical and never empirical. It is the principle of the existence of the universe itself, but not anything inside the universe.


This leads us to our second problem. Agnosticism asks something to be proved empirically through the method of scientific inquiry, when the conceptual and logical structure of the problem itself, the thing been asked to be proved, has no possible empirical expression. To put it straightforward: 
1.1) The concept of God cannot be empirically proved because, 
1.2) given that there would be an empirical proof, it means that it can be tested. 
2.) Hence, if it can be tested, it cannot be eternal, but particular. 
3.) If it is not eternal but particular, it cannot be God.
4.) God does not exist.
5.) If there is God, It does not exist but subsist.
6.) We call faith the act of truly conceiving God.

Agnostics do not follow this reasoning logically, but introduce a fallacy in the middle way. For example: If there is a God, it should be subject to empirical demonstration. But anything subject to demonstration can be anything but God, because the concept of God can only be eternal. This reasoning is obviously paradoxical and there is no way of solving it. i.e. if God is empirically proved, then, it is not God. If it cannot be proven, then I will doubt its existence. But doubt here is an euphemism to hide pure and simple atheism.

Conclusion: agnosticism doubts God by presenting a paradoxical problem that has not logical solution, never mind empirical. And because this paradox is inevitable in the reasoning of all agnosticism, their claim to be open to believe is nonsensical. It is a conscious or unconscious rhetorical device to disguise atheism. Hence, agnosticism is logically inconsistent and ultimately impossible.

A Reflection on Human Rights

With human rights mania, I’ve always asked myself, what differentiates a plausibly human right from an unwarranted one. The reason why the difference should be made is because contemporary experience shows a huge variety of human rights, so varied that we have grounds to ask ourselves if such wide expansion of basic rights doesn’t make them spurious in the end. By human rights I assume we are talking about the basic rights that belong to a human being by virtue of his human condition. The question, then, is about the basic rights of human beings.

Let me illustrate my point with an example. If having food is a basic right, and there is no possible way to provide food for lack of it, then the right becomes spurious, i.e. a mere rhetorical act without denoting an empirical fact. This is actually what happens with many so called basic rights. Take access to internet as another example. If there is no technology and technical resources to provide internet freely, how can it be a basic right? We would be forced to admit that the configuration of the universe itself is breaking this basic right, which is the same as to say that the universe is illegal. Sounds ridiculous, isn’t it?

So, no access to any kind of resource can be reasonably considered a basic right, because it is not in the hands of human capabilities to provide these rights indefinitely. This is the reasonable conclusion from the empirical facts that material resources are subject to changes of fortune, i.e. it is subject to natural changes in the environment, so that its supply cannot be considered absolute or eternal. And because its supply cannot be expected to be absolute, they cannot be basic. Nothing which is changing and tangent is absolute, so it is not basic at all. When we catalogue tangent rights with basic rights, we make the notion of basic rights itself spurious. And because we, in the West, don’t want to do that, we should simply discard as mere nonsense any pretention to make out of a tangent right a basic right.

This is not to say that tangent rights are not important. Nothing farther from what I’m trying to say. They are important, but we must acknowledge that they are of a different nature. They are always subject to environmental changes of fortune; which includes, of course, history. To clarify, tangent rights are positive rights. The reason why I call them tangent is because they are the kind of rights that belong to persons when they are positioned in the historical and cultural context that allows them to have those rights, assuming that under another context, persons would not have them.

What is, then, a basic right? It is the guarantee of non-interference from other human actors in an aspect of the human condition without which the person would not survive. This assumes that individuals want to remain alive. It also assumes that a basic right is an aspect of the human condition that it would not be reasonable to ask of a person to surrender. And by reasonable I mean that it cannot be asked of a person to surrender a right without which it would cease to exist. To illustrate with an example, it cannot be asked of a person to cease to eat to the point of starvation. Access to food might not be a basic right, but access to the possibility of eating by one’s capacities is.

Technically speaking, basic rights relate to physiological necessities, which is not the same to say physiological impulses. All physiological necessities are impulses, but not all impulses are necessary for the purpose of survival. Eating, sleeping and defecating are necessary for survival. Reproduction or coitus is not. But eating, sleeping and defecating imply other things, because they cannot be accomplished without certain actions from the person. In order for these needs to be met, the person must be able to move, and must own the product of his labor force. In order to move and labor, the person needs to think, and to associate himself with other thinking and acting human beings. Because without thinking, men cannot do anything, and without associating himself with other men, he cannot combine his labor force in order to make it productive, without these two rights, men would not be able to survive as men. Besides these, it sounds very unlikely that there would be other basic rights.

Summarily they are:

1)     Eating, sleeping and defecating.

2)     Freedom of movement.

3)     Property ownership (which can be collective or individual, because both work).

4)     Freedom of thinking (which is not the same as freedom to express everything that one thinks).

5)     Freedom to associate with other men for the purpose of economic production.

I assume that if any person takes any of these from any other person, the latter would not survive for long. And I also assume that all human societies have generally respected these rights for the vast majority of their populations, institutionally forming them distinctively according to historical and cultural context. Any society denying any of these to a population is truly denying basic human rights. This definition allows us to define precisely the notion of crimes against humanity, when it can be proved that some persons deprived a particular population of these rights systematically. Other kinds of violations are upon tangent rights; which means that they are relative to historical, normative and cultural context, i.e. there can be no crimes against humanity with the systematic violation of tangent rights.

To clarify rights (3), (4) and (5), it does not imply that the individual lives in a liberal society. A slave might not own himself, but the product of his labor is reattributed by the master in order to keep the slave alive. What we see in slave-master relationships is a division of labor where the master puts all the thinking and the slave puts all the labor, and the fruits are distributed unevenly. Right (5) is the indispensable requirement for division of labor, which includes any kind of division of labor, e.g. slavery, serfdom or wage labor. The only problem of a state of slavery is that it is in the hands of the master to deprive the slave of any of these basic rights. So a state of subjection of such nature does not protect effectively the basic rights of slaves, even though he might still enjoy them by virtue of the slave being fed and clothed by the master. What I’m saying is that even a slave has basic rights when the master allows him to survive, even when they are not positively established. But such guarantee of protection of basic rights is very poor. That’s why we have created tangent rights that are more effective in the protection of basic rights.

This is a ius naturale conception, because any pretention of reaching basic rights is ius natural as opposed to ius positum. It assumes that all human beings have these rights by virtue of their human condition, independently of positive law.

Citizenship rights, on the contrary, are always tangent rights, because they depend on a republican constitution in order for a person to have them. The enfranchisement of citizenship rights will also depend on the form of the republic itself, i.e. if it’s democratic or oligarchic. These will always be positive rights. Persons have them because they are established in positive law. Otherwise they don’t have them. These form part of a huge Western tradition of citizenship that includes rights as freedom of speech, right to vote, to access to office, freedom to form political associations, etc. Because they are tangent, they cannot be filed among human rights. Otherwise we would have to reach the absurd conclusion that the universe has been illegal for most of the time.

I conclude by saying that tangent and positive citizenship rights are the most effective institutional arrangements in order to protect everyone’s basic rights. This is one of the reasons they are so important. It assumes that people will engage in these rights in order to make them effective. Inaction makes positive citizenship rights spurious.

Besides the basic rights already listed, we cannot speak of anything else as basic. In few words, if a right is not established, and it’s not basic, the person doesn’t have it. Hence, liberal claims to protect tangent rights that are not positively established are mere rhetorical arguments.

How to judge History without Self-Righteousness

Frequently in my social relations I find people that practice ethical and normative judgments on history. From a retrospective point of view, i.e. from today toward the past, it seems reasonable to speak of the errors, mistakes and crimes of our ancestors (because when we criticize the past, we inevitably criticize our ancestors).  This is commonly done by establishing a more or less universal conception of the good and justice, assuming that today is closer to the realization of that conception than the past was. It assumes that we know better than our ancestors did. In few words, the conceptions that we use to criticize our present and our immediate past are logically transferred to pass judgment on the far past. I am a strong advocate of our capacity to judge our present (and by present I include our immediate past and our immediate future). Because only through this capacity, which is always relative to our vantage point, can we participate in the public realm through speech viz. violence. 

Now, if we do not accept that our capacity to judge is always relative to our vantage point, it follows that we claim an absolute truth, and the possibility to speak with those that dissent from us becomes impossible. In the realm of logical arguments we cannot exchange truth for falsehood. Whereas in politics there is no truth or falsehood but simply vantage points. This is why I reject any political speech that claims universality. They are antidemocratic, because democracy demands exchange of arguments, and this is only possible when arguments are relative. This regards to our capacity to judge our present.

But when we speak about our far past things change. We no longer participate in the public debate that belonged to our ancestors. We cannot fully understand their context from and within which they acted. Hence our capacity to judge morally is out of context. This means that our moral claims regarding the far past are simply irrelevant. This is common knowledge among historians today. But not among people outside the field of history, many of whom are very fond of passing judgment on the far past, even though they are completely out of context. For many of them, passing judgment on the far past justifies their normative conceptions that they use to judge today's world. For example, when many say that colonialism is bad, and they use this principle to argue that NATO states should stay out of the Middle East, it follows that the Unites States should have stayed out of the western regions of North America, that the Spanish should have stayed out of the Americas back in the 16th century, that the European knights should have never gone in pilgrimage to the Holy Land back in the 11th and 12th centuries, and so forth (these as very frequent examples). Moreover, it follows that the Mongolians should have never invaded half of Eurasia, that the Roman Republic should have never invaded its Italian and Mediterranean neighbors, that the Persians should have never crossed the Hellespont, that Thutmose III should have never invaded Canaan, and so forth. In few words, history should have never been, following the principle that some people use today to judge NATO's involvement in the Middle East. This is a reductio ad absurdum that shows how ridiculous it is to use the present conceptions of our capacity to judge when judging the far past. I say that we should only use them in a conversation when judging our present.

I think many are afraid that, because they do not consistently apply their present normative conceptions to the far past, their conceptions might be erroneous. I also think that this structure of reasoning is based on the arrogant will to present arguments of universal validity. When some people are engaged in an intellectual conversation they need to believe that what they claim is somehow universal, so that it makes sense to them that they are defending it in the first place. They fail to realize that public arguments are always relative, and that it is perfectly fine that it should remain that way. When they have a problem with the relativity of public argumentation, they also fall in the arrogant discourse of passing moral judgment on the far past, as it would be logically consistent. Unfortunately logic is the most authoritarian form of discourse that there is, and for what regards to democracy, this form of speech is unwarranted, and it remains solely in the realm of classrooms of eminent professors. This is a major difference between academia-street and main-street.

However, as a follower of Humanism, I do not pretend to be neutral when talking about history and the far past. I am aware that I am constantly passing judgment. But it is of a completely different sort that when passing judgment on current affairs. Instead of consisting of normative claims, my way of judging the far past is aesthetical; i.e. it focuses mainly on the resonance of historical facts, on the basis that I like some stories and I dislike others. It is not about what I think it should have been, but what I find to be impressive, spectacular, worthy of honor and respect, independently of my normative conceptions that I use to judge today's world. In this way I can admire both the Spanish conquistadores as well as the beauty of the Aztec civilization. Both are amazing to me, and I find the tragedy of their confrontation a wonderful story. Because for me tragedy is not inherently bad but an entelechy of human history. I study history as the best spectacle of all. Just as people don't judge morally the content of the works of Shakespeare, nor they think that Macbeth should have never happened, I think of history in the same exact way. The fact that I think killing is morally bad does not obstruct my reasoning in appreciating Julius Caesar's murder, Urban II's call for the First Crusade, Cortés conquest of Mexico and Cuauhtémoc's last stand, Robert E. Lee's brave defense of the Confederate States of America, or Lenin's revolutionary genius. For me all historical actors always commit moral wrongs. But I do not pay attention to the moral elements in their actions, but just the resonance of their deeds. And that is what makes them spectacular and worthy of respect. All history should be appreciated.

This is the difference between our capacity to judge current affairs, and our capacity to judge our ancestors. They are of two different kinds, and if we do not separate them, intellectual problems arise. The first one is the reductio ad absurdum that follows if we think history should have never been when we use our normative conceptions to judge the far past, and the second is the moral nihilism that denies good and evil when we use the same aesthetical form of judgment applying it to the present.

Paul Auster's Leviathan and the End of American Liberty

This morning I was about to finish the second novel I’ve read from Paul Auster, and I must admit that I was afraid that it would disappoint me as the previous one (City of Glass) did. Not that City of Glass (1985) is a bad novel. I enjoyed it a lot and I think it’s terrific. But the ending just blew it off. Today I want to make a short comment on Leviathan (1992). Not only is the beginning really grasping, but so is the ending

The book’s title is already curious. Leviathan is a Biblical monster, especially prominent in the books of Job, and Jonah, but it’s also the title of Thomas Hobbes’ groundbreaking political treatise of 1651. This should be kept in mind because, even though the main plot seems to have barely any relation to the origin of the name leviathan, it becomes the word around which Auster brings together various notions that are originally separate.

Auster’s Laviathan is a story told by a novelist called Peter Aaron, who recounts his friendship with another writer, Benjamin Sachs, who at the book’s very beginning is accidently killed by a bomb in a deserted road in northern Wisconsin. The entire novel is, then, the explanation of how and why Ben Sachs died that way. The story goes around how they met their respective wives, their respective divorces, their respective lovers, and the respective coincidences that entangle most of their relations, and so forth. It would be a quite conventional story if it weren’t because the reader knows that the main character ends up blowing himself when the bomb he was building detonates by accident. And the shadow of this horrible death is cast all over the novel. You just want to know why he ends up like that, and, in the meantime, many interesting things happen, basically because Paul Auster is an outstanding storyteller.

Sachs’ first book is called The Big Colossus, and the name is a very important detail that the perspicacious reader will not overpass. First, it’s a reference to the Statue of Liberty (which plays a major role in the story), given that it’s a huge statue at the entrance of an important sea port, just as the Colossus of Rhodes was back in the times. And second, because at the moment of his death, Sachs had left an unfinished novel he wanted to call Leviathan. Both are names of gargantuan-size beings, which means Auster is implying a relation between both names. Thanks to this we can grasp the Freudian aspect of Auster’s character buildup. For example, by the middle of the novel Sachs starts becoming more and more depressed as he becomes conscious of his insignificance in the world. He had been in jail (where he wrote his first novel) for opposing conscription during the Vietnam War. He was a man of ideals; left-wing ideals. And as the Reagan era moves forward (the story takes place mostly during the 80’s), with patriotic Americanism and chauvinism reigning everywhere in the political environment, men like Sachs become less prominent, and ultimately ignored. There is a point of the story in which Sachs hides himself in a bookstore and finds his novel, The Big Colossus, piled among other irrelevant titles completely forgotten, for the humiliating price of five bucks. This was the turning point where he decided that he wanted to be a radical activist and stops writing, which is the main decision that led to his death. The immense emptiness he feels makes him leave his adorable wife and drop from the world, and it was due to his ego being absolutely hammered by his surroundings. This is the book’s psychological dimension.

But the richness of Leviathan spreads to mystical and symbolic levels. There is a traumatic episode in Sachs childhood that took place when he was visiting with his mother the Statue of Liberty. Inside the statue, his mom had a panic attack that became a painful memory that might have been the unconscious motive for targeting years later smaller replicas of the statue all over the United States. A very famous passage of Jonah (1:17) says: “But the LORD provided a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish three days and three nights.” The “big fish” is a translation of the Hebrew word “dag,” which is also traditionally translated as “leviathan”. In few words, Auster makes the episode inside the Statue of Liberty analogous to the Biblical episode in Jonah 1:17, where the statue plays both the role of a monstrous creature as well as the hero’s savior. This leads to my final interpretation.

All of this is set on a political background that never takes the front stage until the novel’s final moments, when Sachs drops writing and becomes a radical anarchist. In his rather insane quest to fight the government, he finds himself fighting a gigantic monster, which is the same symbolic image Hobbes makes of the modern state in his Leviathan of 1651. But the Statue of Liberty, as Auster explicitly mentions, is not a controversial symbol like the American flag. Everyone agrees with the ideas it represents, whether they be real or fantastic. But when Sachs sets on this personal mission to destroy this national symbol all around the U.S., he is making the point that what his country used to stand for, liberty, is being destroyed. It doesn't exist anymore. It has been swallowed by the leviathan state, if you wish. The statue itself, the one in Liberty Island in New York City, was a monstrous structure that had swallowed him in his childhood. Its external appearance and immensity only hides a inside shallowness. Hence the main question Auster’s book presents: Has American liberty being swallowed by the monstrous Federal Government?

The conclusion of the book is particularly pessimistic. But as my usual readers might be aware of, I like that.

What I am not

Some clarification on my personal state of political ideas.

I do not hold any universal notion of political justice to be valid. In this aspect I am a relativist. I believe justice to be a product of cultural circumstances, and only within a context of this nature any claim of justice is intelligible, and hence warranted. This is the reason why I do not hold the basic philosophical assumptions of human rights and their kindred ideologies. This is not to say that I reject many of the basic rights that this tradition (in its classical expression at least) holds, but that I reject that there is anything inherent to all of humanity in them. This procedure allows us to respect other cultures' notions as running parallel to ours.

From the previous assumption it follows that I do not hold any particular form of government to be better than others if taken out of context. More importantly to our contemporary condition, I do not think parliamentary democracy and federalism to be models to be successfully copied by all other cultures. Parliamentary democracy and federalism themselves are idiosyncratic aspects of a particular civilization, i.e. the Western civilization. Also within the context of the West's previous forms of political organization are not to be judged according to contemporary ideas, because the context is not only cultural, but also temporal. There is a time for every form of government adjusted to its respective notion of justice. Its deviance from the respective notion of justice set by the historical moment, determines the injustice and unfairness of particular forms of government. There is no other way to judge a particular regime if it is not by the current notions of justice available at the time of the existence of that regime.

It follows that I cannot hold any progressive vision of history without contradiction. I take the discourse of progress, in its Western form (the only form that I am aware of at least), to be one of the fantastic and mythological aspects of our civilization in its final stages. Instead, by virtue of my cultural relativism, I hold the "decline" discourse, that tragically accepts decline and collapse as the inevitable outcome of every civilization. I interpret contemporary history, and post-industrial capitalism in general, to be the final stage of the Western civilization before its disappearance. How it is going to happen no one can precisely tell, but it will happen. I can think of some future outcomes, but they are more of a fantastic character than reasonable statements. E.g. a nuclear holocaust. In this context almost all forms of arguments that stress the necessity of human action to shape history in a positive course toward some abstract normative goals seem to me tragically naive.

These might be the most important reasons why I cannot be labelled a "liberal" in the American context of that vocabulary.

Nietzsche's collapse

I think Nietzsche suffered a deep identification with the collective unconscious to the point of losing his persona completely by the end of his intellectual life. This can explain the richness of primordial images and symbols in all his writings, as well as his convoluted pathos. Also, such loss within the collective unconscious can explain the instinctive and irrational truths of his philosophy, so difficult to understand when we do not try to access it through our intuition but through our rational capacities, as well as the psychotic consequences that this implied to his own mind. In short, he is a magnificent case study of the Western collective unconscious as I understand it from Jung's system.

In his autobiography Ecce Homo (1888) Nietzsche portrays himself as an extremely elevated mind, wise as no other philosopher has ever been. Through Zarathustra, his alter ego, Nietzsche speaks of himself as a prophet and as a diciple of the Greek god Dionysus. Jung says that minds that collapse into the collective unconscious have the propensity to inflate themselves, as if some kind of superhuman enlightenment, or "godlikeness" in Adler's vocabulary, has set them above the rest of his peers, even humanity (Jung, 1975, p. 83-103). But one of the characteristics of the collective unconscious are its irrational contents, the reason of why Nietzsche's philosophy might seem so unphilosophical at times. No wonder why Nietzsche himself denies philosophy as a moralizing quest and denial of the world. He became the conscious rebirth of ancient and pagan symbols repressed by Christianity for centuries, and recently by rationalism.

Nietzsche is no doubt a very strange philosopher. Instead of a quest for truth and knowledge of the world and the mind, he explored the depths of the human instincts, and discovered in them a strength that put into question all the quests for "high ideals" on one side, and salvation on the other. His discovery of philosophy and religion as ideological elements of repression of the instincts made him reaffirm the human as it is given by nature. In this sense Nietzsche is an early psycologist. He saw in Christianity a war against nature, falsifying life and making it miserable, and in philosophy almost as mere fiction. (It is very important that, if we acknowledge that Nietzsche has a theory of ideology, it is far from the Marxist notion. For Nietzsche ideology is the will to power of base and weak minds, not of dominant social classes, consisting in a will to repress aspects of the human instincts that are falsely believed to be evil; hence, keeping under control strong and vigorous individuals with irrational and aristocratic tendencies. Marxism is included within these ideologies, and with good reason).

But what remains remarkable is that his discovery of human instincts was of such a depth that Jung's notion of inflation is clearly seen in his writings. His method of speaking through parables and metaphors is more akin to prophets than philosophers, and he even saw himself in that way. The fact that Nietzsche decided to title his autobiography as "ecce homo", the words Pontius Pilate supposedly said to the Jewish crown when presenting Jesus in John 19:5, is the first and direct signal that he is styling himself after Christ (more precisely as the Antichrist).

But don't get me wrong. The obvious deliriums of his late writings are no reason to discard him as a mere psychotic of no consequence. The difference between him and vulgar madmen are his ginius and his capacity to write. In this sense by styding himself in this state of collapse into the collective unconscious he is saying things about all of us, especially Westerns. This is the reason why he is still considered one of the most important and enlightened philosophers of our era. Definitively not because if his analytical capacities, but because of his acuteness in unmasking our instincts. The symbolic contents of his writings are another reason to believe Jung's system of human psyche; that deep within our unconscious there are collective symbols or archetypes that regulate basic psychical functions. Instead of believing with Freud in a purely biologically determined psyche, the favorite generalization of some neuro scientists, Jung's system explains these shared psychic functions not on cells, neurons or libido, but on contents of purely psychic nature.
Nietzsche, by collapsing on the collective unconscious with the respective psychotic consequences, demonstrates why in the search for our selves we need to pay heed to those symbolic images in religion that he wished to destroy so much.