COMMENTARY
Here is a naturalistic confrontation with Nietzsche, one that accepts his anti-metaphysical, anti-transcendent stance while exposing a fatal blindness at its core. My position remains entirely naturalistic: there is no God, no Platonic heaven, no mystical access to Truth. Yet Nietzsche, for all his boldness, never grasped that his every word, his every premise, his entire philosophical edifice is constructed by and dependent upon the laws of logic. This is his performative contradiction, and it is devastating.
My opening paradox ("The most rational are often the most emotional") diagnoses those who mistake fluency in rational discourse for understanding its foundations. They are emotional because they are attached to forms (to the beauty of their constructions, the comfort of their positions) without recognizing that these forms rest upon something prior and inescapable. The laws of logic are not one more form among others; they are the condition of possibility for form itself.
When I call Zarathustra "the unconfused confused," I mean precisely this: he is masterful at navigating and critiquing inherited structures, at seeing through them, but he never asks what makes navigation and critique possible. He teaches the value of creating new perspectives, new values, new ways of walking, but he never grasps that perspective-taking itself, that valuation itself, that the very intelligibility of "new" versus "old" presupposes logical laws he neither acknowledges nor understands. He is bold, yes (bold enough to declare the death of God, to assault all inherited values), but he is not knowledgeable enough. Knowledge requires recognizing the axioms that govern all thought.
"Come backward and learn the Form that gives meaning to meaning"— my central injunction. Not forward into ever-newer perspectives, ever-bolder transvaluations or new arbitrary tradition-creations, but backward to the ground that makes all meaning possible. (For only then can we intelligently go forward). The Logos I invoke is not a phantom, not a theological construction, not Heraclitus's divine fire or John's Word-made-flesh. It is simply the laws of logic themselves: identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle. These are not chosen, not constructed, not subject to revaluation. They are the unchosen choosers of all choosing, the unconstructed ground of all construction.
This is why I insist one must "demarcate blasphemers for the first time." Nietzsche thought himself the ultimate blasphemer, but he never learned how to identify error. (Indeed, by the laws of logic, Nietzsche is himself a blasphemer against the very laws he uses). Without logical laws as fixed reference points, there is no distinction between insight and confusion, between liberation and incoherence, between bridge-building and bridge-burning. One simply asserts new forms against old forms, with no rational basis for adjudication. But once one grasps the laws of logic (once one recognizes them as the Form that gives meaning to meaning) one has an actual guide. One can refute error. One can distinguish truth from lies not by subjective preference or will-to-power, but by rational demonstration, argumentation and non-contradiction.
"To learn the Truth is to gain the power to crush all lies"— this inverts Nietzsche's will-to-power by grounding power in something he never comprehended. Real power comes not from bold assertion, not from creative self-overcoming, but from alignment with the logical structure of reality itself. And this is entirely naturalistic. The laws of logic are not transcendent entities; they are the way the natural world, including our natural minds, must operate to be intelligible at all. To grasp them is not to escape nature but to understand nature's own structure.
Zarathustra threw away this power "in the name of power." He taught that there was no Truth, that all was interpretation, and in this he was not lying but ignorant. He felt great power in his perspectival freedom, in his ability to revalue all values, but he did not grasp that this very freedom presupposed the stable logical structure he implicitly denied. He taught men to abandon their only reliable guide (the laws of logic) believing this abandonment was liberation. But it was not. It was a surrender of the only tool that makes rational engagement with the world possible.
Herein do I use Nietzschean style against Nietzschean content so that the contradiction is visible within his own register. I am not erecting a new religion, not constructing a new mythology. I am pointing to what has always been there, what Nietzsche himself relied upon with every argument he made, every critique he leveled, every valuation he overturned. The laws of logic are not one more idol to be smashed. They are the hammer that allows anything to be smashed at all, and though Nietzsche wielded them, he did not understand that it was only the laws of logic that allowed him to intelligently wield against anything.
