3.5. A DGB Rendition of Nietzsche's 'Tightrope, Abyss, and Superman' Philosophy: Second Version -- The Legacy of Anaxamander


We all need to climb onto the Nietzschean tightrope overlooking the abyss of our existence - not all the time, but on a decently regular basis - so that we can reflect on, feel on, and act on, the dialectical contrasts between our 'non-being selves' (i.e., a composite of our aliented and alienting behaviors) as opposed to our 'being selves' (i.e, a composite of our 'contactful' behaviors where we are actually making good contact with ourselves and others -- not manipulating ourselves and/or them).

Also fitting into this dialectical contrast spectrum - but extending in a different direction - we might also look at the contrast between our 'being selves' and our 'becoming selves'. In this case, both experiences may be happening more or less simulateousnessly because as we 'behave contactfully' in a way that touches upon the outer edges of our talents and capabilities, we become something a little differently, and become someone a little different, than the 'less actualized' person that we just were before our 'self-actualizing' behavior(s). Does this make sense?

Here we might reflect, feel, and act on the actual essence of the 'tightrope of our life and our existence'. The contrast is this: Are we actually 'climbing' on the tightrope, using our mental faculties, and our passion, our adrenaline rush, and our arms and legs to actually get us to the other side, and in doing so, stretching the limits of our capabilities and potentialities - or are we simply 'hanging there', hanging onto the rope for dear life, or hanging there with someone holding onto us and supporting us, waiting for someone to come and rescue us from the rope overlooking the abyss, the big gaping void, of our existence...This is the difference between 'existential self-suffiency' and 'existential dependency'.

This is my interpretation of Nietzsche's 'Superman philosophy', and it is the starting-point of my own personally modified post-Hegelian, post-Nietzschean, post-a-lot-of-philosphers-and-ideas...'Gap Dialectical, Humanistic-Existential Philosophy'...

My name is David Bain. I am a taxi dispatcher by economic profession which generally keeps my budget reasonably balanced (until recently), and stretches my creative abilities and potentialities sometimes, at other times leaving me a little bored, lethargic, and/or non-challenged...wanting more...

The 'tightrope' formula is generally fairly simple: the more responsibilities we take on - up to a certain threshold of tolerance at least - the more we challenge our own capabilities and potentialities; in contrast, the more we seek to avoid responsibilities - at least of the kind that would legitimately challenge our abilities and potentialies - the more we are going to wrestle with (especially the older we get), the 'existential fallout' of a 'beingless existence' - or worded otherwise - an existence without meaning...

Worded otherwise again, it means that we will all end up having to 'go to trial' at some point in our lives (Franz Kafka, The Trial, 1925, "SOMEONE must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning..." ). Even though the trial may be predominantly in our own minds, this can still be the harshest trial of all - a trial about the accountability and responsibility we all must take for leading and/or having led either a meaningful, substantiated life or a life characterized by the huge, bottomless void, pit, abyss, that we see below us from the tightrope, and/or feel in the emptiness of our stomach and in the aching of our heart...

Those who continue to wait, usually fruitlessly, for someone else to rescue them and/or make their life interesting, are the ones most likely to suffer from the ineptitude of their own 'non-reaching' philosophy and their consequent alienation. (See Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 1948.) Obviously, no person's life can be written in 'black and white', it does no one any good to 'cry over spilt milk', to whine about 'ifs' and 'buts', or to lament how we could have been -- and the positive component of this is that we all can make our life more meaningful and productive at a moment's notice. Something we say, something we do, may be all that we need to do in order to steer what may have been a partly or largely alienated life -- or period of our life -- in a more meaningful, productive direction.

As you can partly see above, reading and writing about philosophy is one of the driving forces in my life. I have an Honours B.A in psychology from too far back to remember (The University of Waterloo, Ontario, 1979) and I am considering going back to university next fall to specialize in Hegelian philosophy, and perhaps even upgrade to an M.A. in philosophy. (I am looking at The University of Guelph in Ontario.)

In the meantime, writing remains the central growing point of my philosophical passion - and integrating Hegel, Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy - Apollo vs. Dionysius, the tightrope, the abyss and the Superman philosophy...), Anaxamander, Heraclitus, Confucious and the Han philosophers (yin-yang), Spinoza (unity, wholism, and pantheism), the Enlightement philosophers, the Romantic philsophers, the humanistic-existentialists, the deconstructionists, and the clinical psychologists (Freud, Jung, Adler, Perls...), academic philosophy and pragmatic philosophy - into a coherent, organized, 'multi-dialectic-integrative whole' - is what I both do, and continue to aim to do with more philosophical clarity and completeness.

Mainly, I am trying to stick to four philosophical paradigms and metaphysical premises as much as possible: 1. the historical paradigm of the evolution of the dialectic -- and 'multi-dialectics' -- in Western (and some non-Western) philosophy; 2. the 'scientific-process' paradigm of Heraclitus' premise of life as 'changing process; not stagnant structure' ('You cannot step into the same river twice' - Heraclitus); 3. the paradgigm of an integration of Nietzsche's, Kierkegaard's, Kafka'a, Beckett's, Sartre's, Freud's, Jung's, and Perls' humanistic-existentialism; and 4. the paradigm of Spinoza'a 'unity, wholism, and pantheism'.

To the extent that I can stick as much as possible to the integration of these four paradigms - and in the process 'climb around on the Nietzschean tightrope of my existence' as much as possible in each and every one of my essays, keeping them coming on a fairly day-to-day basis - to this extent, I expect that I should and will be happy with both the process and the outcome of my life's 'number 1 hobby'. But there is a lot of hard work and discipline that is needed in between the 'gap' of my 'promisary note' here and 'delivering the goods' of what I am promising to deliver.

You look at the careers -- and particularly the writing careers -- of famous philosophers and psychologists like Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, and you realize that success did not happen without a lot of hard work -- living and breathing what they read and wrote about, in Freud's case, usually after he had already put in more than a full day's work in his psychoanalysis room. Sometimes you ask yourself whether the type of dedication and committment to do a job like this is worth sacrificing much of everything else. Is it worth neglecting your child and/or spouse? Kierkegaard walked away from a woman he loved very much and was scheduled to marry. Was he crazy? Turning against a life of 'balance' with a potential 'soul mate' in favour of a very solitary and generally miserable life -- where he did indeed become a great writer and a great philosopher. His sole company was 'God' in a very unorthodox, un-institutional sense of practising his own unique brand of 'existentialized' religion. Was it all worth it?

I believe that 'good balance' is generally to be preferred over 'righteous and existential extremism' which in the end is likely to leave one feeling cold, alone, and empty. What is philosophy if there is no room for the love of other people in your particular brand of philosophy. Many of the greatest philosophers over the course of history have seemed to live very solitary, unsocial lives -- as if battling their whole careers with their own social -- and self -- alienation. Perhaps there was some solice, some celebration, some psychotherapy, in their intellectual achievements. But I ask again: Was it all worth it? Was it worth walking away from love and balance? In a word, I would probably say, 'No'.

Balance, love, social tolerance, and 'dialectical wholism' rather than a very personally construed need and chase for righteous extremism, unilateralism, and a battle for intellectual supremacy could have probably been achieved in these philosophers lives. But that, for better or for worse, did not seem to be many of their destinies -- Socrates, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Doestevsky, Nietzsche, and many more that do not come to the top of my head -- I include myself as an amateur trying, at least in part, to follow much the same direction as many of these famous professionals -- many of whom had to walk that usually very lonely path...down the righteous and solitary lane of the philosopher skaking his finger at the real and/or mistakes and pathologies of the society around him. (Not to be sexist but it was usually a man; and not to overgeneralize and to be sexist again but women generally seem to have a better knack for walking a 'social path' even as they may be just as 'socially critical -- or more -- than men.)

Is it worth not focusing your attention properly on the job that is paying your bills? Indeed, is the time that I need to spend on this project not violating every principle that I am trying to teach in these essays which is essentally that a person ideally needs 'good balance' in every part of his or her life to be healthy and happy? At what point does the human need for 'good balance' in his or her life conflict with the excess -- indeed obsessive -- amount of time that is required to try to be the best that you can be in the field that you are trying to excel in and bring home a performance that all your important loved ones can be pround of, only to find that all your friends and loved ones have disappeared on you because you effectively disappeared on them many years before? The choice between a 'will to balance' and a 'will to excel' is not always an easy one. You look at Nietzsche -- the 'poster boy' philosopher for the 'will to excel' -- and you see that he spent the last ten years of his life in a psychiatric institution, and you ask yourself, Was this from some sort of disease that he contacted along the way? (Syphilus has often been implicated.) And/or was it from a life of 'Dionysian excess'? And/or was it from too much 'philosophical obsession' in his life and not enough 'balance' from other areas in his life (romance, family, etc...)?, indeed, maybe even at least partly from one too many 'crushing love affairs' -- that left him with a huge 'void' in his heart? The same thing might be said about Kierkegaard -- deserting the love of his life practically at the alter for his religion and his philosophy when he was quite young -- and having the rest of his life to 'bemoan' this choice, while he watched her go off and marry another man. I look at the history of Western philosophy and I see what looks to be a lot of 'single' and/or 'lonely' philosophers jumping out at me from every page. There don't seem to be a lot of 'happily married philosophers with families' in these pages. And I can see why? The need to excel has far exceeded the need for balance. Or an obsessive need to excel -- and/or a lifeftime of trying to 'prove a point' -- has 'compensated for' and 'replaced' a 'life of imbalance and an emotional void' -- in most cases, probably motivated by the combination of a heart-breaking loss, grief and/or anger, and a 'transference deficiency' (i.e., carrying around the heart-breaking loss and/or the anger, compartmentalized but feeding an obsession, for a lifetime -- see Freud and 'transference'). I think of Nietzsche and losing his dad as a small boy, his two broken love affairs, and also the anger he had for the 'institutionalized religion' that had been 'introjected' into him as a child -- which he turned into a lifelong tirade against Christianity.

And then I think of Anaxamander's Fragment -- which I view as my own philosophical end to the search for 'The Holy Grail' (the starting point of Western dialectical theory in Ancient Greek philosophy which basically eventually evolved into 'Hegel's and then turned upside down by Marx's monumental, culture-shattering dialectic theory of 'thesis', 'anti-thesis', and 'synthesis'). I think of Anaxamander's cosmic view of justice -- 'what goes around comes around' -- and that the cosmic pendulum of justice will correct all polar imbalances and (un)democratic transgressions eventually over time, partly or mainly because each person and/or each segment of society who or which has experienced a polar imbalance and/or a(n) (un)democratic transgression in a deep and painfully personal-social way -- will most likely obsessively focus on this transgression, and do anything and everything within his or her power to 'see to it that this personal, social, political, legal, and/or cosmic imbalance is eventually corrected'. Call this 'Anaxamander's Law' -- as supported partly by Freud's law of transference. . I believe in Anaxamander's Law. I believe at least partly in Hegel's deterministic, if not always idealistic, dialectical theory, modified into a post-Hegelian, more humanistic-existential 'Gap' rendition -- which supports Anaxamander's Fragment and Anaxamander's Law. I believe in Spinoza's 'spiritual wholism, unity, and pantheism'. I believe in Heraclitus' and much later Korzybski's 'process theory of change -- and epistemology'. I also believe in Heraclitus's theory of 'dialectical unity' which might be viewed as an extension and a modification of Anaxamander's Dialectical Theory, Fragment, and Law. I believe in Nietzsche's 'will to excel' which should be the proper -- or at least the more 'humanistic-existential -- translation of his much more controversial term, 'will to power'. And finally, I believe in a post-Freudian rendition of Freud's Law of Transference as partly supplemented by Perls' Gestalt theory of transference, and Adler's concept of 'lifestyle'. As another amazing evolutonary development of Anaxamander's Dialectial Theory, Fragment, and Law -- which is over 2500 years old! -- one can also see the foreshadowing of the core basics of Gestalt Theory and Gestalt Therapy. Specifically, in Anaxamander's brief philosophy, one can see a foreshadowing of the Gestalt terms 'gestalt-formation', 'figure', 'background', and the more general scientific, biological, and psychological concept of 'homeostasis' as originated by Cannon, The Wisdom of The Body, 1932. I do not think I am stretching my interpretation beyond reason here, and if i am not, then all I can say is that this is mind-boggling and still greatly unrecognized and undervalued in my opinion. Indeed, the legacy of Anaxamander's Dialectical Theory, Fragment and Law is mind-boggling in terms of its evolutionary effect and/or foreshadowing of Hegelian dialectical theory some 2350 years later (G.W. Hegel, 1770-1831m The Phenomenology of Mind, 1807)

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Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
As is the order of things;
For they execute the sentence upon one another
- The condemnation for the crime -
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.
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What was Anaxamander in effect saying?

What goes around comes around...

For every action there is a reaction...

For every thesis there is an anti-thesis...

And neither the thesis nor the anti-thesis will every die...

They will just take turns beating each other up and dominating each other...

One in the sun, the other in the shadow...

And switch...as the power reverses...

As it inevitably will with time...

The swinging pendulum of power...

With neither side ever disappearing...or blasting the other side into extinction...

A foreshadowing of the 'thesis' and 'anti-thesis' theory that would eventually -- some 2350 years later -- become classic Hegelian Dialectic Theory...

A foreshadowing of the 'figure' and 'background' theory that would even later -- almost another century later -- become Gestalt Psychology, and then some 50 years after that -- become Gestalt Therapy.


If you want to see how everything I have mentioned here in this essay comes together into one 'multi-integrative-dialectically-unified-and-whole package', then please keep reading to see how the Gap Multi-Dialectic, Humanistic-Existenatial system, anti-system, and integrative system of philosophy unfolds.


dgbn, Feb. 3rd-4th, updated Feb. 10th, 2007.