Page - 144 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

145 | www.limina-graz.eu Laurens ten Kate | Strange Freedom “The weight-bearing spirit takes upon itself all these heaviest things: like a camel hurrying laden into the desert, thus it hurries into the de- sert.” (54) Without referring to Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt also distinguishes three modes of human activity in her The Human Condition: three “conditions” of how humans appear in and relate to the world. She analyzes what Nietzsche calls the spirit of the camel as labor: survival by taking on the world as it is as a burden and a law. Both Arendt and Nietzsche call this the basic dynamic of the life process (Arendt 1958, Part III, 79–135). The second stage in the three metamorphoses is that of the “lion.” The lion is close to the camel, for both are caught up in a struggle with the world. Where the camel submits to its “weight,” the lion, however, “creates free- dom for itself” by saying a “sacred No” to all moral duties. (Nietzsche 1969, 55) The lion posits itself as the other of or to the world, liberating itself from its givenness. The perspective changes: the world is no longer our other imposing itself on us, but man himself becomes the other of the world. In- stead of the logic of the “Thou shalt” it adopts the logic of the “I will.” (55) “But in the loneliest desert the second metamorphosis occurs: the spirit here becomes a lion; it wants to capture freedom and be lord in its own desert.” (54) This stage of the lion metaphorically reflects what Jaspers (1953), and lat- er on many contemporary scholars of the afore-mentioned axial theory, have named the axial turn or even revolution: a break away from the world dominated by the gods and by fate, towards a world in which humans ac- quire autonomy and the possibility of self-assertion. This axial turn brings with it the gradual development in which humanity becomes technical and rational: by means of technique and reason humans free themselves from the world and start to work on and in it. Traditionally, this shift has been addressed as the turn from mythos to logos.12 Humans surmount the bur- den of the world by gradually controlling and mastering it – turning it into their object, or in Nietzsche’s metaphorical language, their “prey.” Arendt names this second phase of the lion the condition of work (Arendt 1958, Part IV, 136–174). 12 Needless to say, the historical assumption that a primitive world of myth would have been succeeded by a more advanced world of reason is much debated. Hans Blumenberg’s thinking is only one of many ex- amples here: the idea that myths and mythology would have been overcome is extensively criticized by him. See e.g. Blumenberg 1983; 1985. Nietzsche introduces three shapes of the human “spirit”.