'Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking...'
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Nietzsche is not beyond good and evil here...
'Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!"'
I have actually experienced that tremendous moment. In fact, there have been many such moments. For a man, however, to abandon his wife in search of 'freedom' is in fact slavery, slavery to the passions of childhood. Maybe I say this because one of those moments was when I met my wife. There is such a thing as disordered love - it cannot be made righteous by mere desire. There is also such a thing as hopeless love - it cannot be requited by a wish. Real love is a gift of pure freedom, and it is absolute. To abandon the beloved in search of freedom is to forfeit freedom for all time.
Yet in one thing is Nietzsche not only right but righteous - the union of the lover and the beloved is not some deontological confection, ordered by a calculus of duties performed. It is a free union that can never be broken without grave sin. It is self-abandonment for the beloved (here the good philosopher loses his mind), never the abandonment of the beloved for the self.*
For those whose loves are inherently disordered, this world is harder still than it already would have been otherwise. There is nothing to be done, for there is a Love greater still than our human loves, though it is not inimical to all of them. That Love, which moves all things, bears all things, saves all things, is a subject for another time.
* For what it's worth, I speak as one who was once abandoned.
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