HOW RANDOM IS NIETZSCHE?

I raised the title question indirectly in the previous entry, but it boils down to the question of how Nietzsche’s mental illness may have been inseparable from his incomparable genius. We know all too many examples of how extreme physical exertion had claimed lives of dedicated workaholics, ravaging them to the point of an early death before they had been able to reach the physical age of maturity.

It is obvious that Nietzsche had been living in a state of perpetual mental strain before mental illness would claim his mind, dimming the lights and debilitating his faculty of communicating his genius to others. Why is it then so important to determine the exact correlation between his genius and his madness? Having asked a brief question here and there about it, I have no intention of going farther than that. On the other hand, it is not possible to ignore this fact completely.

I cannot say that the wondrously insightful Lev Shestov is completely unaware of the fact that Nietzsche’s last ten years were spent in a state of mental excommunication, after a lifetime of demonstrable mental exertion, but he seems to have a total disregard for this fact in his wonderfully instructive essay Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy. Here is a particularly curious excerpt, dealing with Nietzsche’s inconsistencies and contradictions, which, according to Shestov, he shares in almost equal measure with his object of sincere admiration Dostoyevsky. (!)

“…Hence that strange, alien nature of Nietzsche’s philosophy. There is no stability in it, no balance. It does not even seek them: as in the case of Dostoevsky’s worldview, it lives by contradictions. Nietzsche never misses an opportunity to ridicule the so-called strength of conviction. Premises, which Schopenhauer considered so essential for philosophy, and which he not only justified, but did not even consider necessary to conceal, as is usually done, find in Nietzsche their most caustic and vicious critic. “There is a point in every philosophy,” Nietzsche says, “when the ‘convictions’ of the philosopher appear on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient mystery play: Adventavit asinus, Pulcher et fortissimus…” But, along with such statements, you also find others that seem to be diametrically opposed to them: “The falseness of a given judgment does not constitute an objection to it, in so far as we are concerned. It is perhaps in this respect that our new language sounds the strangest. The real question is how far a judgment furthers and maintains life, preserves a given type, possibly cultivates and trains a given type. We are in fact fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest judgments--- to which belong the synthetic a priori judgments--- are the most necessary to us; that man cannot live without accepting the logical fictions as valid, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the absolute, the immutable, without constantly falsifying the world by means of numeration. That getting along without false judgments would amount to getting along without life, negating life. To admit untruth as the fundamental condition of life: this implies, to be sure, a perilous resistance against customary value-feelings. A philosophy which risks it nonetheless, if it did nothing else, would by this alone have taken its stand beyond good and evil.”

But the question naturally arises: if untruth and false judgments are the basic conditions of human existence and if they help to preserve, or even to develop life-- then weren’t those sages right who, like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, passed off this untruth as truth? And wouldn’t the most sensible thing be to remain with tradition, i.e., to refrain completely as before from seeking truth and, in this regard, to hold to opinions that have been formed unconsciously, i.e. to have those premises, those “convictions,” in connection with which Nietzsche recalls the disrespectful words of the ancient mystery play? If synthetic a priori judgments are so necessary to man that life is impossible without them, that to repudiate them would mean to deny life, then they might as well retain their former respectable name “true judgments,” in which guise they can of course best fulfill their noble purpose. Why expose their falseness at all? Why not follow the example of Kant and Count Tolstoy and place their roots in another world, so that people will not only believe in their truth, but will even be convinced that they have a celestial, a metaphysical, basis? If a lie is so essential to life, then it is no less essential that people think that this lie is not a lie, but the truth. But, evidently, Nietzsche is interested not in “life,” over which he makes such a fuss, but in something else--- at least not in a life such as the one thus far defended by positivists, by synthetic a priori judgments and by their priests, teachers of wisdom. Otherwise, he would not have begun to shout out, almost on the public square, philosophy’s professional secret; on the contrary, he would have tried to conceal it as carefully as possible. Schopenhauer had made a tactical error in proclaiming that philosophy is impossible without premises, but Nietzsche goes even farther. So, in the final analysis, he is not in the least interested in the question of preserving and sustaining what he calls by the abstract word “life.” Although he speaks of such a “life,” as many others do, he does not care about it, or even think about it. He knows that “life” has existed thus far without the tutelage of philosophers, and that it shall continue to get along on its own strength in the future, too. By justifying synthetic a priori judgments in such a risky way, Nietzsche was merely trying to compromise them, in order to open the way for himself to complete freedom of investigation, in order to win for himself the right to speak of things about which other people remain silent…”

I recommend Shestov’s essay in toto to the reader. In essence, he attempts to psychoanalyze Nietzsche, but he never admits that Nietzsche’s genius mind does not easily submit itself to psychiatry, and if it does, only to defeat it at its game. Returning to the title question of Nietzsche’s randomness, it may be argued, helped by the cliché phrase about “a system to one’s madness,” that in his case such a system exists as well. I shall not argue with this opinion. But in so far as I am concerned, the thing that I treasure the most in my friend Nietzsche is exactly the randomness of his flight of intellectual fancy. In fact, I treasure it so much that had I been confronted by irrefutable evidence that it is not so, I would have pretended that it is so anyway, in order not to suffer a bitter disappointment.