Nietzsche: The God of Groundhog Day

By Michael Faust

Is Groundhog Day the greatest philosophical movie of all time? It examines Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, and the possibility of becoming a Superman and even a god.

Did Nietzsche's atheism disguise a pious Lutheran spirit? What is the basis of our love of music? What are the implications of building a machine that gives us everything we want? Is narrative non-fiction a form of parasitism? Do novels have personalities? How can a book be loved by some and hated by others?

Is the publishing industry dominated by people of a certain Myers-Briggs type, and are certain sections of the population being denied the sorts of books they would like to read because the books they enjoy aren’t rated by commissioning editors?

Is the human race destined to be always stupid? Did German philosopher Hegel think he was God?

This is a book by the Pythagorean Illuminati.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447890720

Michael Faust

Michael Faust invites you to explore the divine order, with its most astonishing secret - that you are part of it. You always have been. But you have forgotten. That's the nature of the created world - to make us forget that we are all the Creators. Isn't it time to remember who you truly are?

Book preview

Nietzsche: The God of Groundhog Day

Nietzsche: The God of Groundhog Day

by

Michael Faust

Published by Hyperreality Books

Copyright © Michael Faust 2011

The right of Michael Faust to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

ISBN: 978-1-4478-9072-0

Quotations

I’ve killed myself so many times, I don’t even exist anymore. -- Bill Murray (Phil) in Groundhog Day

…for what has hitherto been forbidden on principle has never been anything but the truth. -- Nietzsche

I am not a man, I am dynamite. -- Nietzsche

"Disgust at mankind is my danger." -- Nietzsche

I am by far the most terrible human being there has ever been. -- Nietzsche

"I am the first immoralist." -- Nietzsche

"I have a terrible fear I shall one day be pronounced holy." – Nietzsche

Table of Contents

Nietzsche: The God of Groundhog Day

Quotations

Table of Contents

The Illuminati

Groundhog Day and Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence

Hegel and God

Nietzsche: Lutheran Preacher or Antichrist?

Nietzsche’s Critique of Science

Scientists: Apollo Versus Dionysus

Why Humanity Will Always Be Stupid

Freedom – The Supreme Delusion?

Why Should I Be Good?

Ethical Futures

The Experience Machine

I Am Half Sick Of Shadows.

The Orbiting Sun

Autism and Theory of Mind

The Difference Between Empathy And Sympathy

IQ

Music as an Epiphenomenon

Do Novels Have Personalities?

Narrative Non Fiction as Parasitism?

The Invasion That Never Was

Snapshot

Two of a Kind

The Journal of a Man who kept a Journal

Yours Sincerely

The Illuminati

THIS IS ONE OF A SERIES OF BOOKS outlining the religion, politics and philosophy of the ancient and controversial secret society known as the Illuminati, of which the Greek polymath Pythagoras was the first official Grand Master. The society exists to this day and the author is a member, working under a pseudonym.

The Illuminati’s religion is the most highly developed expression of Gnosticism and is called Illumination (alternatively, Illuminism). Dedicated to the pursuit of enlightenment, it has many parallels with the Eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. It rejects the Abrahamic religions of faith: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, considering these the work of the Demiurge; an inferior, cruel and wicked deity who deludes himself that he is the True God, and who has inflicted endless horrors on humanity.

If you wish to judge for yourself how deranged the Demiurge is, you need only read the Old Testament, the story of the Demiurge’s involvement with his Chosen People, the Hebrews. You may wonder why the God of All entered into an exclusive and partisan Covenant with a tribe in the Middle East several thousand years ago, why he promised them a land (Canaan) that belonged to others, and why he then actively participated with them in a genocidal war against the Canaanites. Even more bizarrely, according to Christian theology, he then despatched all of those Hebrews, whom he had supported so fanatically, to Limbo – the edge of Hell – when they died. They couldn’t go to Heaven because they were indelibly marked by the Original Sin of Adam and Eve. Only the atonement provided by the agonising death of God’s son, Jesus Christ, could wipe the slate clean and allow the Hebrews to be released from Limbo. But there was a catch. Only those who accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour were eligible for Paradise.

Of course, the Chosen People of God have almost entirely rejected Jesus Christ. Therefore, from the Christian perspective, nearly all of the Chosen People are now in hell proper. Don’t you find God’s behaviour distinctly odd? Indeed, unbelievable? Don’t alarm bells start ringing? Doesn’t the behaviour of this God sound rather more like what would be expected of Satan?

Remember that this same God ordered Abraham to perform human sacrifice on his own son, Isaac. Abraham, rather than rejecting this monstrous command, rather than denouncing the creature that gave it as evil incarnate, agreed to butcher his own flesh and blood to demonstrate how slavishly and mindlessly obedient he was – the prototype of all psychopathic, fanatical believers.

Does God’s command to Abraham sound like something that would ever pass the lips of the True God? We pity you if you think it does because you are surely a creature of the Demiurge and one of the legions of the damned. If, however, you doubt the credentials of the Abrahamic God, you may be receptive to the message of the Illuminati and our future-oriented, rational, scientific, mathematical and dialectical religion of light – Illumination.

Groundhog Day and Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence

Is the film Groundhog Day (directed by Harold Ramis) one of the greatest celluloid statements of philosophy? Viewed at the most trivial level, it’s just a Hollywood rom-com, but on closer inspection it furnishes a dazzling treatment of Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, even to the extent of illuminating Deleuze and Irigaray’s conflicting interpretations of this key Nietzschean thought. It also throws light on postmodern thinking regarding simulacra: representations without originals. Finally, it updates the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus and casts its protagonist Phil the weatherman, (played by Bill Murray), in the role of Sisyphus, the absurd hero.

Eternal recurrence is the idea that we have lived the exact life we are leading now an infinite number of times in the past and will do so an infinite number of times in the future. If we’ve enjoyed a particularly eventful and pleasurable life, this might sound like the greatest of good tidings. If not, eternal recurrence may strike us as a curse. Our misery, far from being over when we die, is destined to echo through eternity. This is a chilling recasting of hell, as horrific as anything Dante conceived.

In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray finds that every day, no matter what he does, he wakes up at the same time in the same bed in the same hotel in the same small American town. In the next twenty-four hours he is free to do anything he likes, but he knows he’s condemned to start the whole process again as soon as the day has run its course. In a sense he has achieved immortality. Even if he wants to die, he can’t. But is this a blessing or a malediction? In his little kingdom, Murray is God himself, yet a God who is powerless to escape.

Deleuze might offer Murray a crumb of comfort. According to his interpretation of eternal recurrence, Nietzsche was not in fact promoting the idea of the return of the identical but rather the return of the different. Each return selects the life enhancing while rejecting the life denying, leading to each iteration being more affirmative than the last. As Deleuze says, We can thus see how the eternal return is linked, not to a repetition of the same, but on the contrary, to a transmutation. It is the moment or the eternity of becoming which eliminates all that resists it. It releases, indeed it creates, the purely active and pure affirmation.

Deleuze’s version of eternal recurrence doesn’t seem well supported by what Nietzsche actually wrote. Indeed, it seems a somewhat perverse reading since it implies that the world should be improving with each iteration. But, as Nietzsche pointed out, if the world were moving towards any final state then, taking into account his belief that an infinite amount of time has passed before now, we would unquestionably have arrived at that state by now. Therefore if Deleuze is right, we should have reached a world of supreme affirmation. Manifestly, we haven’t. Deleuze’s vision is glorious and optimistic, but not in tune with Nietzsche’s conception. Nietzsche wanted eternal recurrence to be as harsh a truth as conceivable so that it would literally destroy those who could not cope with it. Only Supermen would be able to affirm life in the face of infinite bleakness.

Groundhog Day contradicts both Nietzsche and Deleuze. In Bill Murray’s world, there’s no Nietzschean return of the identical since he’s able to act differently each time and cause different events to happen. Nor is each repetition more affirmative than the last. In fact, Groundhog Day presents a far more human version of eternal recurrence. Murray largely muddles his way through his dilemma. Sometimes he’s less affirmative, sometimes more. Driven on by love, he does finally reach a state of transmutation and at that point he escapes from eternal recurrence. He is redeemed by love, by the kiss of the beautiful princess, and thus philosophy is converted into fairytale.

This gives us a clue that Luce Irigaray is perhaps the right philosopher for furnishing us with the key for unlocking the mysteries of Groundhog Day. Irigaray agrees with the conventional view that eternal recurrence concerns the return of the same. She objects to it on the grounds that it’s a sterile thought that excludes any notion of the other. She writes, The eternal recurrence – what is that but the will to recapitulate all projects within yourself? In other words, it is self-referential, tied to a cloning process. We might think of it as a type of parthenogenesis, or auto-birth as some feminist commentators have labelled it. It provides men with the ability to give birth to themselves over and over again, thus denying the role of the female as lover and mother.

Irigaray wishes, above all else, to promote the value of the other, which she largely conceives in female terms, in opposition to the traditional philosophical subject that she considers rigidly male and masculine. She says, For, in the other, you are changed. Become other, and without recurrence.

In Groundhog Day, it’s Bill Murray’s love for his female colleague (played by Andie MacDowell) that proves decisive. By immersing himself in otherness, by learning everything that makes McDowell tick, he undergoes transmutation. He sheds his old, sexist, masculine carapace and emerges as a far more rounded human being, in touch with his Anima, his feminine side (his inner other). As soon as he has fully achieved this, he’s released from eternal recurrence, thus seemingly endorsing Irigaray’s view.

Murray, at his point of liberation, is