In his Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche praises Heraclitus, the Greek pre-Socratic, for his
          “assertion that being is an empty fiction.” 1 The philosophical notion of being, which seems to
          refer to fixed entities or substances, is eclipsed (at least in the mind of Nietzsche [and perhaps
          other philosophers—Gilles Deleuze comes to mind]) by the notion of becoming. As a result of
          our innate nothingness—which I defend linguistically, via the structuralist concept of the
          arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign—it would seem that we do, in fact, lack a fixed internal
          essence. Rather, we are constantly redefining (and free to redefine) our being, which is never
          fixed. It would seem that “un-fixed” being is becoming. In my paper, I aim to track this notion of
          becoming, as directly opposed to being, through two literary instances: the biblical Christ, and
          the philosopher-author Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek

Klapes, Peter

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 0 = ∞ 21 T he Biblical figure of Jesus Christ, it would seem, is an embodiment of exactly the sort of fusion—of Apollo and Dionysius; of the rational and the irrational—that Frie-drich Nietzsche admired in Greek tragedy. As both Paul’s “folly to philosophers” and John’s “Logos” (Λόγος), Christ symbolizes the humanization—and thus rationalization—of the mystery of God, just as much as he magnifies the contra-dictory and absurd nature of the world and of human life. Further-more, on the cross, Christ’s kenotic, or emptying act, can be read as a facilitation of a Nietzschean annihilation of being, which be-comes substituted by the notion of becoming.    In what follows, I will attempt to investigate two narra-tives—one Pre-Nietzsche and one Post-Nietzsche: that of the bib-lical Christ and that of writer-philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek—as ‘lived’ examples of Nietzschean thought.   In rejecting the philosophical notion of being (that is, fixed entities or substances), Nietzsche attempts to draw our at-tention towards the nothingness (and therefore, infinite freedom) that underlies human existence. By accepting the human condi-tion of nothingness and freedom, it can be understood that one never is, but also, that one is always becoming. As one, following Nietzsche’s exhortation, ‘gazes into the abyss’ and accepts one’s 0 = ∞ The Nietzschean Concept of Becoming in the Figures of Christ and Zorba the Greek   Peter Klapes  Peter Klapes is a current undergraduate at Boston College, studying Philosophy and English. His philosophical interests include the intersection of philosophy and literature, existentialism, psychoanalytic theory, phenomenology, and the philoso-phy of religion. Over the past few years, Peter has presented his work at various international philosophy conferences and has served as editor-in-chief of Dianoia, Boston College’s undergraduate philosophy journal. Having received an invitation to join the department of philosophy’s honors program, Peter will spend a consid-erable part of his senior year working on a thesis, into which he hopes to incorpo-rate as many of his aforementioned areas of interest as possible.    Peter Klapes   22 essential emptiness, one opens oneself up to the possibility of an infinitely and radically free sense of personal existence. Though Nietzsche credits Heraclitus, the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher, for such notion (“Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction”),1 it appears as though, in many ways, Nietzsche—a philologist after all—foresaw the later evolution of conceptions of language, signification, and the lin-guistic connection (or disconnection) with ontology. That is to say, that if the nature of the linguistic sign is arbitrary and the signifier and signified are bound merely by a superficial social contract, then it must be the case that our own being—existence—is always realized through negation, and not predica-tion. In the statement “I am me”, ‘me’ is an empty sign. It gives us no information about the ‘I’, and the ‘I’, therefore, also re-mains empty. However, if I were to say that “I am not a tree”, then the ‘I’—the ego—would begin to take on meaning. In fact, the ‘I’ can be defined merely through an infinite list of nots—negations. The ‘I’ is free to bear an infinity of significations be-cause, at its base, it bears no a priori signification. Its innate nothingness frees the ‘I’ to be defined in infinite ways.    The Nietzschean notion of the necessity of the annihila-tion of being in an opening up to infinite becoming can be ob-served in the figure of Christ. In his Letter to the Philippians, Saint Paul writes that “Jesus made himself nothing” (Philippians 2:7). By negating his very being—Jesus opened himself up to infinite becoming. Through his empting act, Christ’s free, irra-tional, and contradictory (perhaps even Dionysian) essence is called forth. Being nothing, Christ can become God and man at once. He is, in such a manner, free (e.g. of binary oppositions, transcendental signification, etc.). In becoming nothing, Christ can live contradictorily: he can legitimately be both man and God. In a similar manner, according to the Kabbalistic concept of tzimtzum, God facilitated creation through self-annihilation (or perhaps more appropriately, through self-contraction). God di-minishes—or contracts—himself in order to create (humanity). God dies on the cross in order to save (humanity). Through, in Nietzschean terms, the “death [or crucifixion] of God”, humanity is saved from its imprisonment. Humanity is saved from the hala- 0 = ∞ 23 kha (Jewish religious law), and finds itself free from its previous-ly ritualistic existence that applied transcendental signification to such things as even the penile foreskin. With Christ—who even-tually comes to symbolize the death of God—the physical world loses its significance: it loses its fetishized status. Through the annihilation of such fetishizations, the human individual becomes free. The foreskin no longer signifies respect for God; the fore-skin merely signifies the foreskin (which, after all, due to the ar-bitrariness and meaninglessness of predication, would signify that the foreskin is nothing). The acceptance of the essential nothing-ness of the real world, which Christ brings about, seems to be the ultimate project of Nietzsche’s thought and such a removal of sig-nificant meaning even from death itself seems to be a result of Christ’s emptying act. Again, in his Letter to the Philippians, Paul tells us that just as soon as he “became nothing”, Christ “became obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:9-10). By becoming obedient to the reality of death, Christ remains stoi-cally neutral towards his humanely fate: he neither fights it nor celebrates it. He applies no meaning or transcendental signifi-cance to it: he accepts it as reality. Much like Nietzsche’s Goe-the,, Christ appears as a “free spirit [, a spirit that] stands in the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism […] that in the totality everything is redeemed and affirmed—he no longer denies.”2 Such a kenosis—of the “fiction of being”; of the impris-oning divinity that we believe lies within us—seems to fall well within Nietzsche’s vision for humanity. Much like Christ, we must purge from within us the things that lift us up, bind us, and connect us; which define us and limit our freedom. Through such kenosis of being, we live, as Nietzsche suggests, in light of be-coming.   If we accept that God is everything, then it must be the case that God is also nothing, for within the set of everything, even nothing resides. In the same way, if God is everything, then God must also be man. Transitively, man—who, because of his nothingness, is free to be anything and everything—must be God. Indeed, Christ’s figure wholeheartedly represents this very no-tion. Such a notion of man who is both nothing and who can be anything—as formalized through the philosophy of Nietzsche— Peter Klapes   24 can also be seen in Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek.    On the most basic level, Kazantzakis’ novel represents exactly what Nietzsche so very much loved about Greek tragedy. The narrator, a young intellectual man described as valuing books over firsthand experience, represents the Apollonian, while Alexis Zorba, whose lasciviousness, drunkenness, and anti-reason attitude seems almost unbelievable, represents the Diony-sian. On another level, however, the novel stands for the innate contradictoriness of the world. Zorba, in particular, represents the free man who, like God, Christ, and Nietzsche’s Übermensch, lives a full life as he accepts his ability to be everything which comes through an acceptance of his innate nothingness. Follow-ing the teachings of his elder, Zorba, Kazantzakis’s narrator (whomwe shall call “the Boss,” as Zorba does) finally realizes humanity’s freedom: “One sees clearly now that he is nothing”.3 In fact, by emptying the world one sees that anything is possible. Zorba, the Dionysian, lives in a dark, drunken state where bor-ders become invisible, and where contradictions are impossible. The Boss, nonetheless, describes his friend’s synthetic mind: “God, the business’s best interests, and the widow had joined to-gether inextricably in Zorba’s mind.”4 Most importantly, howev-er, through the freedom that Zorba exhibits, God becomes possi-ble. As one purges oneself of the logical, artificial boundaries that society has fabricated, the concept of God becomes possible. In Zorba’s world where, through negation, everything becomes possible, God becomes possible as well. The Dionysian remarks: “Does God exist or does he not exist? What says Your Highness? And if God does exist (everything is possible, after all) how do you imagine him?”.5 God is illogical, and it would seem that the existentialist—who sees beyond the oppressive force of logic—can accept the notion of God if they so choose.  A concrete example of the productive nature of the de-structive act is seen through Zorba’s severance of his finger. In a broader discussion about aesthetics, artistic production, and Zorba’s dabbling in pottery, Zorba recounts:     0 = ∞ 25 So once I was a potter. I was crazy about that trade. Do you know what it means to take a lump of clay and make what you want out of it? The wheel and clay spin around like mad—ffrrr!—with you standing over them saying […] ‘I’ll make the Devil knows what! That means, I’m telling you, that you’re truly human. Free! […]  ‘So what about the finger?’, I asked.  ‘It got in the way on the wheel, kept getting in the middle and spoiling my design. So one day I grabbed an adze and—’ ‘Didn’t it hurt?’ ‘Of course it hurt! Am I a tree trunk? I’m a man: it hurt. But it hindered me in my work, I’m telling you. So I cut it off!’”6  Here we see that in order to create, some sort of destruction must occur. In this instance, it seems clear that Kazantzakis draws a parallel between his Zorba and the Judeo-Christian God, who is, in the Bible, often portrayed as the potter (and we—humanity—and the world, his pottery). God and Zorba both create through annihilation, contraction (as the Kabbalistic term holds), or sever-ance. As Zorba tells us, it is when he realizes that he is “[…] truly human! Free!”, that he is able to face his full creative potential. The severance of a finger symbolizes, in the grander picture, the purging—emptying—of worldly fetishizations. The fetishized organs (think anal, oral, etc.), to which one becomes, in Freudian terms, ‘fixed,’ get in the way of orgasm or, in this case, orgasm’s close relative: art (which, much like orgasm, symbolizes the har-monization of the non-empirical and the empirical; the union of fantasy and physical object). Just as God, Zorba creates through annihilation. God’s creation and Zorba’s creation occur in an identical manner. Creating art is cathartic: it occurs as an empty-ing of oneself into the Other (whether the Other be, in God’s   26 case, man, or, in Zorba’s case, pottery). When one creates, one ceases existing as oneself, as an individual: one becomes split, existing as oneself, the creator, and as one’s Other, the created. The act of creation is, in Nietzschean terms, living as becoming, for it requires one to annihilate the “fiction of being,” “gaze into the abyss,” and realize his freedom and nothingness. Creation, in this way, is destruction just as destruction is (and is a necessary predicate of) creation.     Another instance in which we see similarities among Christ, Nietzsche, and Zorba (in whom Kazantzakis seems to be actively interweaving the former two) is through the concept of becoming-child. Matthew reports to us that Jesus thus advised: “unless you change and become like little children, you will nev-er enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:2-4). Much like a child, Jesus constantly speaks in metaphor (where the use of met-aphor itself speaks to the fact that we understand what something is through difference—through the fact that something is not something, not that something is something), using basic exam-ples to communicate his thoughts. Often, in fact, Jesus appears as a child (after all, he is the son!) who privileges action over speech. He never wrote anything down. In Thus Spoke Zarathus-tra, Nietzsche celebrates the child: “But say, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion cannot do? The child is inno-cence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes-saying”.7 And finally, on New Year’s in Kazantzakis’ novel, Zorba tells us that “for me, just like the New Year I become a small child again; like Christ I am reborn. The way he is born every year, so am I”.8 In the ex-amples at hand, we see a celebration of childhood. We see char-acters who exhibit a “sacred Yes-saying” for life, who act as if before their entrance into the Lacanian symbolic. They communi-cate using metaphors and their bodies. Indeed, Zorba communi-cates through dance and seems to have no patience for verbal lan-guage as we see in his remark: “men have sunk very low. They've let their bodies become mute and they only speak with their mouths. But what d'you expect a mouth to say? What can it tell you?”.9 Christ, Zarathustra, and Zorba are not encumbered by what Nietzsche would call the fiction of logic, or the fiction of Peter Klapes   27 reason: they are carnal creatures, in touch with man’s ability to exist freely and infinitely, laudably innocent in the light of absurd humanly constructs.   A staunch atheist, the German existentialist Friedrich Nie-tzsche is one of Christianity’s most known critics. Despite his distrust of Christianity itself, Nietzsche has communicated some inkling of respect for Christ, remarking that “there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”10 In fact, much of Nie-tzsche’s philosophy can be read and realized through the biblical figure of Jesus Christ. A man who makes God rational through his being Word, Jesus serves as a concrete example of the mysti-cal Hebraic God. At the same time, Jesus is a manifestation of utter irrationality and absurdity of human life. Embodying both the divine and the physical, Jesus symbolizes the existential free-dom—the infinitude—that is found at the center of every human individual. In many ways, Jesus’ freedom, as well as his ability to annihilate the world’s trivialities, is an example of Nietzsche’s ideal man. Compared, on many an account, to Christ and to God, Alexis Zorba symbolizes a lived example of Nietzschean philoso-phy. It seems to be no coincidence to me that Zorba—who Ka-zantzakis developed with Nietzschean thought in mind—has been compared (both para- and inner-textually) to Christ. Both charac-ters seem to have successfully—as Nietzsche would celebrate—annihilated “the fiction of being” in order to live in light of be-coming. Both characters have realized their essential nothingness, have recognized their own existential freedom, and have ultimate-ly been able to see their own lives in light of the infinity of life itself. Their transcendence of fetishizations —which, needless to say, lead to feelings of regret and guilt and shame, and which oth-erwise limit one’s innate freedom—allows them to live their lives in infinite ways, in accordance merely with their own choosing. It is telling, nonetheless, that a Nietzschean line can be sewn in a connecting manner through centuries upon centuries of human thought, regardless of the fact that Nietzsche died just over a cen-tury ago.   0 = ∞  Peter Klapes   28 Notes 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols. (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998.) p. 17.    2. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 114.    3. Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek, Trans. Peter Bien (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2014), 194.   4. Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek, 141.   5. Ibid., 125.   6. Ibid., 25.   7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra. (HathiTrust Digital Library.) p. 44.   8. Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek, 140.   9. Ibid., 73.   10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920.) p. 111.  References Kazantzakis, Nikos. Zorba the Greek. Trans. Peter Bien. New   York: Simon and Schuster, 2014.   Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Anti-Christ. New York: Alfred A.   Knopf, 1920.   —-. Thus Spake Zarathustra. HathiTrust Digital Library.   https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt? id=uva.x002755611;view=1up;seq=3 (accessed 11   December 2017).   —-. Twilight of the Idols. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics,  1998.   The Bible. Revised Standard Edition, Massachusetts Bible   Society, 1965.  

0 = ∞ The Nietzschean Concept of Becoming in the Figures of Christ and Zorba the Greek

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