This article addresses the role and meaning of prayer as well as the language of piety and praise in Nietzsche’s writings, notably in Zarathustra. This essay was first presented as a talk in German at the 2017 Nietzsche colloquium in Sils Maria, the theme of which was “Zarathustra und Dionysos”. In preparing it for a publication in English, the argument has been reworked and expanded and references have been added, while partly preserving the tone and structure of the oral delivery. (...) I am grateful to the instructive comments and suggestions of the anonymous reviewers for Nietzsche-Studien. Nietzsche can be read as an uncompromising critic of religion but also as the initiator of a new form of faith, described by some scholars as a “Dionysian piety”. The analysis takes its lead from the way in which Z refers to his yes-saying as also saying “amen”, exploring how Nietzsche explicitly incorporates the language of religious discourse into his writing. Examining passages where he explicitly questions the adoption of confessional language and prayer, it criticizes as overly simplistic the view of his thinking as seeking a new piety. The discussion of the significance of prayer from a psychological, linguistic, and poetological perspective highlights the experience of “inspiration” as a key to the adoption of confessional language in Z. In an interpretation of the last part of this book, it shows how its concluding scenes coalesce precisely around the role and possibility of prayer and piety, and how a crisis in the narrative is triggered by the inability of Zarathustra’s visitors to properly understand his message in this regard. A concluding interpretation of the section “Before Sunrise” in the third part of the book shows how it gathers the philosophical stakes involved in Nietzsche’s understanding of prayer, piety, and confessional praise. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s name has become almost synonymous with militant atheism. Born into a pious Christian family, this son of a Lutheran pastor declared himself the Antichrist. But could this have been yet another of his masks of hardness? Nietzsche rarely revealed his innermost self in the published writings, and this can be gleaned mainly from his private letters and the accounts of friends. These sources bring to light the philosopher’s inner struggle with his own, deeply religious nature.Losing his father at a (...) young age was a calamity from which Nietzsche never recovered, and I argue that his famous thought-image “God is dead” was a transfiguration of the painful memory of this loss. In this essay, I trace Nietzsche’s tortuous path from an ardent devotee of God to a vociferous critic of Christianity, a path that was punctuated with veiled longings for a loving deity. Deep in his heart, he remained faithful to Christian ideals. Rather like Cordelia, the only truly loving daughter of King Lear, Nietzsche refused to utter words of intense affection and reverence, as these had been blatantly devalued and corrupted. Instead, he adopted a mask of a wrongdoer and a blasphemer who took not the punishment but the guilt.Nietzsche’s attitude to religion is discussed from the perspective of his life, his personality, and his mental condition. The discussion draws on psychoanalytical concepts of Freud, Erikson, Winnicott and Kohut. This is not an exclusive reading, but complementary to other studies in this field. (shrink)

Two recent works will be considered that discuss Heidegger and Nietzsche in the context of the problem of overcoming metaphysics and the onto-theological tradition. A common criticism will be that these works in their attempt to retrieve a conception of religion, politics or faith beyond onto-theology and metaphysics tend to justify or idealize particular historically and culturally conditioned perspectives, which are not immune from further philosophical critique. Simon Oliai’s approach to countering the burgeoning fundamentalisms in our global age is ultimately (...) not very convincing, representing as it does, a Western, liberal, Eurocentric worldview. The author’s use of Nietzsche or Heidegger for this purpose is also not very compelling. The remainder of this review essay appraises the volume edited by Cimino and van der Heiden, which attempts to rethink faith beyond onto-theology in several interesting ways. Although meant to be a comparative study, several contributions subscribe to a general Heideggerian (or Heidegger-inspired phenomenological-hermeneutical) theoretical framework, which itself is not rigorously scrutinized. A problematic implication is that Nietzsche’s own critical and constructive views of philosophy, his critique of religion and history, and his positive appraisal of faith and divinity are not seriously considered on their own terms: they are either mostly ignored, or they are selectively interpreted through a Heideggerian lens, with the result that this volume puts forward a mostly unfavorable view of Nietzsche. Some of the conceptual moves credited to Heidegger in the volume have their equivalents in Nietzsche’s philosophy, which a comparative and evaluative study such as this one must seriously take into account by resisting the uncritical acceptance of Heidegger’s own view of Nietzsche. (shrink)