The Mask of Enlightenment Quotes

“In the broadest sense of the term, Nietzsche is not an ontologist or metaphysician but indeed a political thinker. His most comprehensive intention is to transform the collective circumstances of human existence in order to breed a new race of mankind. It is in this radical and comprehensive sense that Nietzsche is a prophet or lawgiver.”
― Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra

“It is certainly true that in his later writings, published and unpublished, Nietzsche speculates on what look like metaphysical or ontological questions. At the risk of some (but not much) oversimplification, we could say that his main thesis with respect to these questions is as follows: Heraclitus was correct and Parmenides incorrect: Being is Becoming, everything is in motion, stability is a ratio of changes, ratios are changing perspectives, changes emerge from chaos and not in accord with a plan or fundamental order. Note what follows from this “ontological” thesis: there is no ego, no subject, and hence no will. The will to power is in fact an infinite regression of points of force. This is what Nietzsche means when he refers to the will as an exoteric concept. No apparent cohesions, or what one might call fields of force, have a unifying identity. Hence personal identity is an illusion. It follows further that there can be no explanation of illusion itself, of why we experience ourselves as finite personalities, why we perceive things or objects, why our experience is organized as if it were a coherent whole. This is what Nietzsche means by his acceptance of Heraclitus’s reference to Zeus as a “playing boy” (pais paizon). The cosmos, or what we take to be order, is just the purposeless play of chaos. Nietzsche’s enthusiastic adoption of Spinoza’s amor fati comes to the same thing. Nietzsche is not a genuine Spinozist except for one point: he denies teleology, or divine purpose.”
― Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra

“[Nietzsche’s political thinking] consists in the attempt to make use of the ontological doctrine, the ostensible truth about the illusory nature of our experience or order and stability, but hence too of belief in the stability of values, to clear the path of history for a return to the fructifying origin, to chaos itself, understood as the source of all new forms and hence rejuvenation. Nietzsche wishes to remove the tattered mask of late modern European civilization from the face of chaos in order to replace it with a new and vital one. This requires of Nietzsche that he enlighten his own contemporaries by accelerating their dissolution; remember that clarification is destruction. The return to chaos as origin will make possible the birth of a new race of mortals and so another cycle of the eternal return. The preliminary step is to obliterate the coming of the last man but all of Zarathustra’s bombastic rhetoric fails to conceal from the sober reader the disconcerting fact that the last men share with the Nietzschean philosopher the modern spirit of the scientific Enlightenment.”
― Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra