From “Homo Eroticus” towards the “God-man”

On Shai Tubali’s The Mystical Enlightenment of Friedrich Nietzsche (Theophania Publishing, 2013)

Written by Dr. Bettina E. Preney (Paris-Sorbonne/Strasbourg)

Shai Tubali’s vision of the Übermensch should be considered in a Nietzschean spirit – meaning, that for a genuinely free man, it is required to go into dialogue with the philosopher’s theory, to contradict, destroy and build a new vision. This implies that the purpose of such a vision is to catalyze our thinking of the future rather than introduce some absolute truth about humankind.

Shai Tubali argues that although Nietzsche creates the remarkable concept of the Übermensch, he does not give any guidance as to how such a truly sovereign free being could evolve from the conditioned, very limited consciousness of most contemporaneous human beings. Nietzsche merely outlined directions. One could say he was touching only lightly on the realness of the Übermensch without providing clear instructions on how to reach this ideal. He failed to provide humans with the tools to enable them to become the Übermensch – and he also failed to offer a unified observation of all structures and forces that drive the world –  like psychology and cosmology as one, along with religion, spirituality and philosophy, as well as history, physics and biology; unifying and re-creating the perception of the world.

Shai Tubali’s most important critical argument concerning Nietzsche’s concept of the superhuman is that he failed to answer the key questions: How will the Übermensch create new values? Will they pull from the same source that created morality and values in the first place – the limiting, conditional thought? What is going to be the source of the new ontological authority?

Exactly these key questions are answered by Shai Tubali in the description of his vision of the superhuman – the God-man.

Nietzsche’s tremendous aspiration is to remain ‘faithful to the earth’ and create a new divinity from within it and from within us. Instead of the dead God, a new God rises in our image, evolution takes an incredible turn, and the human ‘ape’ heritage is left far behind by the same force of humankind’s increasing self-awareness.

The Übermensch lifts himself from the herd. He or she has enough power over themselves. They achieve self-mastery –  and full control.

Nietzsche, so it seems, ‘killed’ God as the first volitional act of the Übermensch – and the question still stands: which God did he kill? Without a doubt, he killed the view of God as an object, a being outside of creation, as well as the perception of God as an ‘absolute’ and as a kind of basic premise. Nietzsche wished to void the natural world of the external God so as to empower this world and grow new life from within it, a ‘living divinity’. His Übermensch is the ‘naturalistic’ alternative, an image of a real creator, that is completely non-mythological; he is a god who rises from within the human.

Shai Tubali argues that in order to encompass such a challenge – to be a god that rises from within – human consciousness must first be explored in its totality and its utmost potential must be fully known.

Nietzsche did not possess such a broad and profound self-knowledge, otherwise how could he demand humans to become creating godheads, while they were lacking the sufficient skills of consciousness to expand to such magnitudes?

We may be helped by those rare individuals who have claimed to have become one with ‘God’ through direct knowledge. Remove mysticism, the shackles of morality and religion, and the errors they have made based on assumptions disguised as trustworthy metaphysics – and you will find that they, as a natural product of natural evolution, have e x p a n d e d their consciousness more and more until they have ‘found’ ‘God’ as an endless, limitless consciousness. This is the product of nature, within human consciousness. There is  a hidden godhead consciousness which is not a mystical phenomenon, but an infinite, all-embracing  self-awareness.

Thus, states Shai Tubali, Nietzsche missed the fact that God’s very death as an external phenomenon compelled his birth in human consciousness. God was killed in order to be reborn once again in us. And there is no mysticism in it; only a shattering of the self-fabricated limits of our consciousness, limits marked by a dividing thought – namely, the habit of drawing the line between subject and object.

In the deepest sense, the will to power is an urge to merge. A desire for a limitless self-expansion – to be everything, to be everybody, to fill the entire space, to become the world itself. Thus, concludes Tubali – the idea is not only to realize the urge, but also to awaken it and to make it conscious and present at the center of one’s being. Between the law of attraction (merging) and the law of rejection (autonomy), the urge to merge is the most important – attraction is the deep primal libido, whereas the drive of rejection is like the psychological ego: only a means to preserve basic social order.

If we agree with one of Nietzsche’s first and most important observations which he made in the ‘Birth of Tragedy’, the goal of mankind is to release the Dionysian, orgiastic, eruptive element  – while using the restraining, disciplining and observing Apollonian element to maintain balance and prevent disintegration. However, the Apollonian element is but a regulating force – not a sovereign force.

In essence, Shai Tubali asserts, life belongs to Eros (attraction) and Dionysos (merging), both held and directed by Apollo.

Eros is the heart of life. Eros is the glue that connects and holds together all the different parts of life and the world. Eros should not be reduced to the areas of sexuality and love. It is hidden at every stage along the course of natural selection and behind every will to power and self-expansion.

The true conscious erotic attraction is aware that, fundamentally, the distance between autonomies is only a distance of perception that takes place on the surface of consciousness. For this reason, it wishes to create a merger that will consist of both the absolute identity and the otherness.

Where is this all leading?

The God-man is an urge to merge that has awakened to itself and that has guided consciousness towards increasing expansions and ceaseless abolitions of limits in the realms of intelligence, creativity, will and awareness. The urge to merge expands humans (as opposed to empowering them and ‘elevating’ them like the will to power), and finally, leads them away from the ‘merging human’ – Homo Eroticus – towards the ‘creating human’.

In this way, the Homo Eroticus itself finally merges into a much more supreme being that uses the urge to merge to create a new world. Just as the will to power is a tool of the Übermensch, so too the urge to merge is a tool in the hands of the God-man; it is an inconceivable, raw force that can transform the very planetary matter and reassemble it into a divine world, a world in which the internal metaphysics can be seen by all.

Shai Tubali concludes that the most important question that should concern the entire human race is not whether or not the vision laid out within these pages is ‘true’ or ‘false’, but whether it is worthy of creation: what level of energy and empowerment can this vision grant human consciousness? What is the potential it can release into the world?

A vital vision is not necessarily founded on its creator’s belief in its objective truth, but rather on the extent to which they are convinced that, of all things, this may promote mankind towards its next step.

In this vision, Tubali demonstrates, aided by Nietzsche, a willful abstinence from all metaphysical ideas to enable humankind to finally take on its ultimate creative responsibility.