The
question of heredity, in acquiring spiritual nobility and therefore the capacity
for philosophizing in the best Nietzschean sense, is certainly intriguing,
considering that such heredity covers not just the personal family tree, but even
more so the national cultural characteristics. Can a noble soul rise out of
plebeian roots or out of a degraded social environment with an undistinguished
history of a diminished cultural tradition? Here is an interesting statement to that effect from Nietzsche’s Jenseits (213):
“For every high world one must be
born, or to speak more clearly, one must be cultivated for it. A right to
philosophy one has only by virtue of one’s origins; one’s ancestors, one’s
“blood” decide here, too.”
It
goes without saying that having been born to one of the greatest cultures in
the history of human civilization, the Russian culture, I have thus a selfish
reason to embrace this idea with great enthusiasm. But even a much more objective
look at it elicits this rhetorical question: Yes, and can you imagine it
being otherwise? The very next question, of course, being: yes, but what about
Socrates? What kind of heredity and birthright did he possess? A very
provocative and enlightening question, indeed: What made Socrates a great philosopher, was it the air of Athens, or
his wife Xantippa? Apparently the reports passed on to us about her proverbial
querulousness and cantankerousness merely reflect upon her enviable ability to
wear more than one hat, and even to provide some cattle.
On
the other hand, considering the uniqueness of our God-given soul, does it mean
that, even before being born, some of us are discriminated against by God’s
choice of the country and family to which we are born, to the point of a
predestined incapacity for the nobleness of spirit? This is an exciting line of
thought, to which I must one day return, but it is only a parenthetical aside,
in so far as this entry is concerned.
There
is an organic connection, however, between this and the previous entry: Philosopher’s
Will to Power (posted on my blog on August 1st, 2012). In both
of them the philosopher emerges as an absolute monarch entitled to rule. But he
is by no means an automatic heir to a preexistent kingdom. Being a creator
himself, he parallels the Nietzschean relationship between a genius teacher and
a genius student: between a master and a master. Paraphrasing that famous
dictum, it is possible to say that in Nietzsche’s ‘hereditary kingdom’ not
as common heirs do, succeeds a creator his creator ancestors.
This entry will be sorely incomplete without an
excellent quotation from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, where he talks about
geniuses, allowing us to equate the ideal philosopher with the consummate
genius:
“Great geniuses have their empire,
their renown, their greatness, their victory and their luster, and have no need
of material grandeurs, with which they have no relation. They are not seen with
the eyes, but with the mind; that is enough.” (Pensées, xix.)
In
other words, the philosopher’s hereditary kingdom isn’t much to literally look
at, but the upside of this is that at least he is never threatened by a
subversive coup d’état, or by a liberating foreign invasion…
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