“DRY, CLEAR, WITHOUT ILLUSION”? PART I.

Philosopher… what does it take to be one?

My first writings were variations on my favorite themes from Greek mythology: theogony, the Greek war against Troy, the adventures of Odyssey, the madness of Ajax, etc. I started writing them around the age of nine, and a couple of years down the road added a short unfinished novel and a long poem about knights in shining armor, noble chivalry, and base treachery. Writing poetry and prose became my obsession, as I used a deliberately tiny scrawl to fill dozens of thin school notebooks and a couple of very thick ones... Around the age of thirteen, under the influence of the already frequently mentioned Anatoly Ivanovich Zimin, I started writing philosophy, that is, my meditations and contemplations on matters of a higher order, including God, Man, good and evil, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, etc. These were obviously my early tries, which, regrettably I later destroyed, on account of their childish immaturity, unfairly judging them by my later pre-adulthood standards, which they obviously could not meet.

Under more propitious circumstances I would have become a writer in the Russian philosophical tradition, that is, incorporating philosophy into my creative writing of fiction. And, perhaps, I might have even been writing nonfictional, straight philosophy. Who knows? This alternative course of my life is imponderable, and it makes little sense to project it now, almost at the end of the actual life.

But had I indeed become a philosopher, what kind of philosopher would I have made? Here is my greatest authority on the subject, Nietzsche, quoting another authority, whom he admires, namely, Stendhal:

“Stendhal, this last great psychologist, says that ‘To be a great philosopher one must be dry, clear, without illusion… A banker who has made a fortune has one character trait that is needed to make discoveries in philosophy, that is to say, for seeing clearly into what is (pour voir clair dans ce qui est).’ “(Jenseits, 39.)

When I first wrote my comment on this Nietzsche’s comment on Stendhal, it was rather confused. My later comprehension was helped by bringing to my mind the great Russian/Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s powerful line: “…And in the heart, burnt out like Egypt, are thousands of thousands of Pyramids.” Such is my interpretation of the word “sec” now! Not one person claiming to be a philosopher can have a heart that is not a burnt-out desert; none, whose heart is not a solemn cemetery of his past, blown through by the dry winds of his present, with nothing, but the same dry winds, forming the landscape of his future.

In other words, in my mind I could not possibly become a philosopher when I was swimming in the tears of joys and sorrows, when my sight was blurred by those tears, and my mind was blurred by the multiplicity of rosy illusions. My philosophical state was as far removed from Stendhal’s notion of philosopher as the Arctic is removed from Antarctic (yes, the two opposite poles, which admittedly have a lot in common!)… was there some special meaning in that? And then, how does Stendhal’s prism represent Nietzsche’s own character as a philosopher?

Nietzsche is quite obviously in love with Stendhal. But isn’t the wonderful Frenchman denying his philosopher label to Nietzsche, once we try to literally interpret his dictum? Who can be less dry, more passionate, or more filled with all sorts of illusions than our dear Nietzsche? Philosophy for him is a continual non-stop inspiration, and prophetic speech of the highest order. To say that anything he says is in any way compatible with the person of a “banker who has made a fortune” can make a crack paradox, in the tradition of Oscar Wilde, but it must be a grave and outrageous insult to Nietzsche himself, that is, to the philosopher inside him. Take this quality of clarity, for instance. Even this is a very different quality in the philosopher than in Stendhal’s banker. And finally, if Stendhal has nailed it on the head, what, then, is Zarathustra, and whatever on earth can he have in common with the concept of sec which Stendhal makes the cornerstone of his thought in the quote?!

Mind you, I am talking about a true philosopher that I had always aspired to be, and not a caricature of one, whether in real life or in the depiction of others.

My view of the philosopher, then, is a clash of the opposites, the meeting of Stendhal and contra-Stendhal in the person of the philosopher. Having cleared that out of the way, here is how I have viewed the person of the philosopher throughout my life. To this view I have added some later observations, as my persona of thirty or even forty-five years ago would have very much agreed with them, being a natural outgrowth of the kernel formed an even longer time ago.

(This is the end of Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow.)