u/Rare_Entertainment92

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players...

Jaques may or may not have been a gnostic. Whether Shakespeare was, we cannot know.

Shakespeare's religion was as private as everything else about himself.

Nietzsche began religiously uninteresting, as an atheist. By the end, he could not resist a near constant transgression, going, of course, in the other direction:

[Man's] whole economy is richer, mightier, and more complete when he is in love than when he is not. The lover becomes a spendthrift; he is rich enough for it. He now dares; he becomes an adventurer, and even a donkey in magnanimity and innocence; his belief in God and in virtue revives, because he believes in love. Moreover, such idiots of happiness acquire wings and new capacities, and even the door to art is opened to them.

That is from the spectacular note 808 in the Will to Power, which I have ceased from defending, and so, if you think the work merely apocryphal, let me give you real Jesus and tell you to 'repent', which literally means turn back -- and to do so, I pray thee, quickly.

I rely on the Will in this essay, and like Paul, I have grown weary battling with the beasts of Ephesus on this one 😮‍💨.

[As an aside, I was surprised when my 'last defense' of the will actually was well-received. Unlike Ulysses, and very gratefully 😊, it appears for me sometimes the winds are fortunate. (That poor man, I have just seen the movie.)]

Nietzsche, certainly, all along was creative religiously. Observe notes in Beyond in which he seems to step back and consider religion as if he were to found one.

And, of course, the whole enterprise of the Genealogy is to get back to what one might call the 'Place of the Founders', or rather it is a time, when the morals were made up.

I have already put so many people off that if I invoke Freud here, I will lose all audience, and deservedly, but we must admit that Freud was exceptional in his delvings into childhood memories and the 'totem and taboo' days of primitive man (for childhood is where the morals are made up again for each individual entering the world).

[2]

I like the Genealogy, a work which really goes.

Although, nothing goes like Beyond. (Not out of any literature I have read and can immediately recall to mind.) It is breathless from start to finish.

I can just about stand the rhapsody at the end, "What is Noble?" which nearly chokes me with its wind.

To call Nietzsche an 'aphorist' at such moments is to transgress the meaning of aphorism. These are chapters, about 30 of them, in quick succession.

Note [132] of the Will has a violence to it: "We reserve ourselves the right to several kinds of philosophy which it is necessary to learn: under certain circumstances, the pessimistic kind as a hammer; a European Buddhism might perhaps be indispensable."

'Founder Nietzsche' has fun side (I suppose, with a streched definition).

'stretching' may be one of the transformations (or basic movements) of 'transvaluing'--the supposed practice of the Will (or so says its subtitle).

But I do not have time or space to develop before you a full system of tropes, or theory of the drives and defenses (our various attacks and retreats).

I have just about enough time (I know you are growing impatient) rather hastily to end this essay.

And so I do.

[3]

I would like to return to Shakespeare, but I must make one last mention of Nietzsche (or else this post, certainly, and probably rightfully will be removed). And I want to mention the übermensch--as we all are contractually obligated.

If like me, you live in Beyond and the Genealogy, making frequent excursions to the Will (and sometimes turning back, strangely, to that early essay on Greek theater), then the übermensch just never will have meant very much to you 🤷‍♂️. (I think in the Will there are the most glimpses.) I understand his obsession to the masses, and the mass-in-me loves him and longs 🥺🙏 for his advent (necessarily deferring that role to another)--if only (the elite-in-me says 😒) to quiet discussion on the topic.

We decry 'Great Man' history and then go on falling in love with, variously electing and pumping the stocks of 'Great Men'--and if we cannot find them 'Good Enough Men' (so it appears) *will* do. But a political digression is the last thing this essay needs.

What it needs is an exaltation or apotheosis, which is what Shakespeare gives us in Talbot (of all characters).

The famous lines about Caesar are an 'aggrandizing' (perhaps another trope), which necessarily diminishes (comparison being equivocal). [Caesar grows; the actual Colossus (of Rhodes) shrinks.]

This defies equivocation:

You are deceived, my substance *is not* here;
For what you see is but the smallest part
And least proportion of humanity:
I tell you, madam, were the whole frame here,
It is of such a spacious lofty pitch,
Your roof were not sufficient to contain't! [II.3, 883-7]

...

Therefore I conclude by saying that I think Nietzsche's best work is titled precisely: Beyond.

With no other guerdon, but only: to grow!