The ancient symbolic world and the modern analytical thinking

(translated from my Chinese blog)

This is my new project, “Nietzschean Philology”. In each installment, I’ll read a passage from Nietzsche’s original writings. By practicing text analysis, we can enhance our ability to understand the world.

The reading of "We Philologists" continues. Section 19 raises the question of the symbolical, although Nietzsche had already employed this idea multiple times in the preceding text, attempting to challenge the analytical thinking of modern people and throw us back into the symbolic world of the ancients, in this section Nietzsche is, through a subtle philological operation, advocating for a symbolic and holistic ancient way of thinking by replacing "symbol" with "the symbolical" (das Symbolische), and opposing the conceptual and analytical modern thinking.

He who has no sense for the symbolical has none for antiquity: let pedantic philologists bear this in mind.

"We Philologists" 19, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by J. M. Kennedy 

The word "symbol" naturally brings to mind the allusion to the Odyssey in Section 14, where Hades becomes a symbol or sign for the philologist (or the weak in life). [I will temporarily use the word "符号" (sign) here, but this word is problematic, and I will explain at the end why "象征" (symbol) is more in line with Nietzsche's original intention, as well as the relationship between "象征" (symbol) and "象征世界" (the symbolical).]

While Nietzsche never explicitly stated this, from the beginning he was implying that all religions, morals, ideologies, and broadly speaking, culture, are signs, interpretations of the naked experience of existence. Section 1 "bene navigavi cum naufragium feci" (I was sailing well when I had a shipwreck) - this uses sailing as a sign to interpret life; Section 3 "[the masses] will train [the superior ones] consciously or unconsciously after their own image" - this implies that the masses become the omnipotent gods of the new era; Section 9 uses the Christian concept of salvation as a sign to interpret the ability of people to live "with an eye to the future"; Section 12 "a touching modesty on the part of mankind" - uses Christian humility as a sign to interpret people's inability to face the problem of life's vocation directly and their tendency to live a life of "serving others" to muddle along; Section 14's Hades signifies the personality type with weak vitality, while Achilles' signifies the heroic personality type that yearns for life and faces challenges.

We can roughly summarize a rule: wherever you see metaphors, allusions, analogies, or other rhetorical devices, you can try to restore the "sign-entity" structure.

However, this rule often requires deeper understanding and an understanding of historical context when applied in practice. For example, in Section 3, "The masses [...] train them [the tyrannized hundreth] according to their own image" alludes to the story of God creating man in Genesis. What are the sign and the entity here?

Nietzsche is actually constructing a second-order sign on top of the original sign. The original is "God created man," with God or the gods as the sign, corresponding to the "savior of the nation" in the minds of the ancients ("whatever stems from the highest need and still liberates, the rarest, the most difficult – that is praised as holy." - Thus Spoke Zarathustra), while God creating man in His own image corresponds to the powerful shaping effect of these individual heroes on the character, temperament, and habits of an entire nation. This is the process of educating the masses by individual heroes, who use their own charisma, such as dignity, boldness and appeal, to influence the masses. Using Nietzsche's favorite biological metaphor, it is akin to the process of domestication of lower organisms by higher organisms. Therefore, although the masses also imitate the individual heroes, the sign of "God created man" emphasizes the almost coercive transformation process of the heroes on the masses.

Nietzsche's second-order sign reveals the coercion of the original ("training") while mocking the fact that the masses do not have the qualifications to discipline outstanding individuals, but instead force them to be vulgarized and become equal to the masses, revealing the truth of "people's dictatorship." "What then becomes of the classicism of the Greeks and Romans?" -- What then becomes of all humanities?

The "semiotics" of Nietzsche must be understood with great care: today there is a fashionable way of understanding it, which is that the ancients were not more stupid than the moderns (which is true), so the ancients would likewise invent stories for themselves to provide meaning and pleasure (which is a great mistake). Nietzsche did not mean this. In the ancient vision, there was no distinction between signs and entities; the sign was the entity, the hero was a god-like being, a force of education that shaped the masses; or, to use a sign more familiar to the Chinese, "the Way" was the path, not a metaphor, but the geographical meaning of which path to take, in the diverse and complex geographical environment of ancient core China, knowing which path to take was a god-like power, it was "attaining the Way".

Nietzsche discusses symbols in this section, but the original term is not "symbol" but "the symbolical" (das Symbolische). As a philologist, Nietzsche would not use words casually. I have translated it as "象征世界" (the symbolic world) rather than "sign" (符号) or "symbol" (象征) for the following reasons.

Semantically, signs and symbols differ fundamentally in that, signs are merely carriers of meaning, akin to "pointers," and are inherently empty. For instance, the letter "P" on a pole by the road signifies a parking spot, but the letter "P" itself is devoid of meaning; the meaning resides elsewhere (parking). Remove this "P" from its context, and we have no idea what it represents. In contrast, symbols possess inherent substance even when removed from their context. This concept closely aligns with Jung's collective unconscious and archetypal ideas. Nietzsche's choice to write "the symbolical" instead of "signs" was a direct critique of logicism. It was precisely because the ancients lacked the "sign-entity" thinking that they did not demystify the world, allowing them to believe in what we might consider far-fetched notions. For the ancient Jews, Yahweh was a real creator and savior, not a set of myths concocted to provide legitimacy. It was neither a sign nor an entity but "a symbolical being," a governing existence that unifies the real world with the symbolic world. Once these two worlds are separated, the symbol degenerates into a sign, and its power diminishes.

Thus, translating it as "symbol" is still insufficient. Nietzsche uses "the symbolical" to convey, both the ancients who saw the world as various symbols and lived in them, and (putting oneself in the ancients' perspective) the powerful and all-encompassing symbolic world that truly exists. You must temporarily abandon modern analytical thinking and immerse yourself entirely in that magical symbolic world where gods and spirits truly exist, otherwise you won't understand ancient people and their lives at all.

Nietzsche's insight into the importance of symbols in human life is not original, but he is a milestone that cannot be bypassed in this line of thought. He opened up some of the most important intellectual approaches of the 20th century: literary symbolism (Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Rilke); anthropology and cultural theory (Cassirer's "man is the symbolic animal," Lévi-Strauss's anthropology); psychoanalysis (the semiotics of dreams, archetypal theory, collective unconscious); existentialism (Heidegger, Gadamer). But looking back at Nietzsche from these approaches, we find that almost all approaches are "more modern" than Nietzsche, that is, they tend to understand the symbolic world in the way of "sign-entity" rather than taking it literally. Surely Nietzsche himself, and the "born philologist" in Nietzsche's mind, are also modern people, and they could not take ancient myths literally. But the problem is rather: since biologically, the human brain of modern humans is almost identical to that of humans 60,000 years ago (so you know why biology was so important to Nietzsche), then when modern humans face survival crises, do they also need the ancient ability to enter the symbolic world, that childlike ability to believe in earnest, in order to enter some "modern mythology"? Well then, wouldn't the "sign-entity" thinking, or what we might call modern analytical thinking, be that ability's greatest obstacle?