GOTT IST TOT

 

In the chronological sequence of Nietzsches Werke, now comes Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882), mostly famous for the “Gott ist tot!” phrase. Curiously, this phrase appears twice in the book. The first time cryptically, the second time explicitly. Here is its cryptic version:

(108). New Struggles. After Buddha was dead, people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave, an immense frightful shadow. God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow. And we have still to overcome his shadow!

This aphoristic Nietzschean entry merely states that God is dead, but it does not clarify the circumstances of His death. That purpose is served by Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (#125), which is told as a fanciful story about “The Madman.”

It is important to realize that Nietzsche’s madman of the Gott ist tot fame is not really mad, to Nietzsche. In fact, he can well be Nietzsche himself. (Which should not be news to Nietzsche’s detractors!) The core idea of my entry is its parallel between Nietzsche’s parable and Dostoyevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.

“Gott ist tot!” is, undoubtedly, the most famous of all Nietzschean quotes, and one of the most famous ones in all history of one-liners. The context of this phrase is however not as clear to those who are repeating the three words as if they signified Nietzsche’s cry of victory in his personal combat with God, as if his revolt-- against all values and all morality-- triumphed, in his sick mind, in the death of God.

Here, however, is Gott ist tot! from the horse’s mouth, that is, in the context of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft #125.---

(125). The Madman:

Have you heard of the madman who on a bright morning lit a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: ‘I seek God! I seek God!’ As there were many people standing about, who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of amusement. Why, is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a child? said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Afraid of us? Taken a sea voyage? Emigrated?--- the people laughed, all in a hubbub. The insane man jumped into their midst, transfixing them with his glances. Where is God gone? he called out.--- I mean to tell you! We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon, what did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun, whither does it now move, whither do we move?! Away from all suns? Do we not dash on, unceasingly, backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and a below? Don’t we stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall not we have to light lanterns in the morning? Do not we hear the noise of the gravediggers, burying God? Do not we smell the divine putrefaction?-- for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed has bled to death under our knife; who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event,  and, on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto! Here the madman went silent, and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished. I come too early, he then said. I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is traveling--- it has not yet reached men’s ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. This deed is as yet further from them than the furthest star--- and yet, they have done it themselves! It is further stated that the madman made his way into different churches on the same day and there intoned his Requiem aeternam deo. When led out and called to account, he always gave the reply: What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of God?

Without disputing all other claims of Nietzsche’s renunciation of God (which claims have been considered in other entries and sections), I want to point out only what concerns his Gott ist tot!, namely, that it is his accusation thrown at moral and religious hypocrisy of people and churches, who have alienated themselves from God by practicing the opposite of what they preached.

It is not enough, though, to limit our interpretation to the figurative sense only. After all, the infamous event of “deicide” (not in theological, but in ethical terms) has indeed taken place, literally, in the Christian tradition. And in Dostoyevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor (which is part of his novel Brothers Karamazov), the possibility of murdering God yet again, in case He should resist being banished from this world forever, is very strongly implied. In fact, Dostoyevsky’s Legend is a perfect timeless commentary on Nietzsche’s Gott ist Tot.

(The fact that the Legend predates Nietzsche’s dictum by a couple of years is of no consequence, as we are looking at this from a higher perspective than mere chronology, as I have already noted in my entry The Wanderer And His Shadow. Besides, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky are spiritual brothers, and their ideas are dwellers of the same neck of the woods in their commonly shared mystical commonwealth of concepts.)

 

HOMO IRRATIONALIS

This entry may serve as an illustration of the point made in the earlier entry Digging, Mining, Undermining.

***

Nietzsche the irrationalist. I love it. Where else could irrationalism be better rationalized than in the following two aphoristic entries of his Morgenröte?---

99. WHEREIN WE ARE ALL IRRATIONAL. We still continue to draw conclusions from judgments that we consider as false, or doctrines in which we no longer believe, through our feelings.

123. REASON. How did reason come into the world? As is only proper, in an irrational manner: that is, by accident. We shall have to guess at this accident as a riddle.

In the first aphorism, he says that are allegedly rational judgments are inevitably affected by our irrational feelings. This is first-rate psychology! By the same token, all philosophy, even the most rationalistic, is also subjective and ergo irrational.

As for the second aphorism (I have purposely juxtaposed them in this manner), Nietzsche mentions a riddle here, and I will clarify this as a logical riddle, whose answer can be expressed in the following logical form:

From Morgenröte #99 follows Morgenröte 123.

I am sure that the conundrum is no longer a riddle, when thus formally expressed.

CUSTOM AND INDIVIDUALITY AS MORALITY AND IMMORALITY

Nietzsche’s Morgenröte series of entries continues in the chronological order.

***

By the same token as we may applaud one person of convictions, but abhor another person of convictions, depending on what these convictions are, what their extent is, and how the person in a position of power is using or abusing them in his or her life, we can say the very same thing about the correlation between social customs and a person’s individuality. We should know that it is improper to elevate any particular custom to the lofty status of an object of religious veneration just because it dates back several centuries. But, on the other hand, it is equally wrong to dismiss customs and traditions on the grounds of their ancient origin, as if they have automatically been outdated by the progress of the times. Customs and traditions are always the lynchpins of civilizations and national cultures. Remove them, and the fast-spinning wheels of progress will surely come off our chariot, causing it to overturn, plunging the riders into a total mess.

Looking at it from the individual’s perspective, an iconoclastic person who breaks up every idol of the past ought to be judged by the amount of harm he perpetrates. An independent thinker who has assumed the role of a gadfly on the body of his society must be allowed and welcomed to pursue his vocation, as we ought to recognize that even his bitterest criticism serves only as a tonic to everything which is healthy in a society, but it turns into a necessary life-saving remedy in each case when it addresses an actual malady. Nietzsche was definitely one of the largest gadflies humanity had ever been blessed with. But, on the other hand, an authoritarian person in a position of great power can do society great harm by debunking traditions, and by destroying great symbols by the unbridled force of his anathema, like Khrushchev did it to the Stalin symbol in 1956, undermining the whole Soviet edifice, which, however, would hold off its subsequent inevitable collapse for another thirty-five years, but then, eventually, caved in…

This discussion is highly pertinent to our reading of the following passages in Nietzsche’s Morgenröte 9 and 16, published in 1881, and given here in excerpts:

Concept of morality of custom. In comparison with the present mode of life of whole millennia of mankind, we, present-day men, live in a very immoral age. The power of custom is astonishingly enfeebled, and the moral sense so rarefied and lofty, that it may be described as having more or less evaporated. That is why the basic insights into the origin of morality are so difficult for us, latecomers, and, even having acquired them, we find it impossible to enunciate them, because they sound so uncouth, or because they appear to slander morality! This is, for example, already the case with the following chief proposition: morality is nothing other (ergo no more) than obedience to customs, of whatever kind they may be. However, customs are the traditional way of behaving and evaluating. In things in which no tradition commands, there is no morality; and the less life is determined by tradition, the smaller is the circle of morality. The free human being is immoral, because in all things he is determined to depend upon himself, and not upon a tradition: in all the original conditions of mankind, “evil” signifies the same as “individual,” “free,” “capricious,” “unusual,” "unforeseen,” “incalculable”… Judged in terms of these standards, if an action is performed not because tradition commands it, but for another motive (because of its usefulness to the individual, for example) even indeed for precisely the motives which once founded the tradition, it is called immoral and it is felt to be so by him who has performed it: because it has not been performed in obedience to tradition. What is tradition? A higher authority, which one obeys, not because it commands what is useful to us, but because it commands. What distinguishes this feeling in the presence of tradition from the general feeling of fear? It is the fear in the presence of a higher intellect that here commands, of an incomprehensible and indefinite power, something more than personal: there is superstition in this fear. Originally, all education, care of health, marriage, cure of sickness, agriculture, war, speech and silence, traffic with one another, and with the gods, belonged within the domain of morality: they demanded that one observe prescriptions without thinking of oneself as an individual. Originally, therefore, everything was custom, and whoever wanted to elevate himself above it had to become a lawgiver and a medicine man, a kind of demigod: that is to say, he had to make customs—a dreadful, mortally dangerous thing!… Those moralists who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions, and if it seems otherwise to us it is because we have been brought up in their aftereffect: they all take a new path under the highest disapprobation of all advocates of the morality of custom— they cut themselves off from the community, as immoral men, and are in the profoundest sense evil. Thus, to a virtuous Roman of old, every Christian who considered first of all his own salvation appeared evil, each individual action, each individual mode of thought arouses dread ----it is impossible to compute what precisely the rarer, more original spirits in the whole course of history have had to suffer through being felt as evil and dangerous,---- indeed, through feeling themselves to be so. Under the dominion of the morality of custom, originality of every kind has acquired a bad conscience, and the sky above the best men is for this reason to this very moment gloomier than it need be. (9)

First proposition of civilization.--- Among barbarous peoples there is a species of customs, whose purpose is custom in general: minute and fundamentally superfluous stipulations, which, however, keep continually in the consciousness the constant proximity of custom, the perpetual compulsion to practice customs: so as to strengthen the mighty proposition, with which civilization begins: any custom is better than no custom. (16)

This last condition of any emerging civilization is perfectly reasonable and understandable: Any custom is better than no custom, because without customs and traditions (religion is, of course, a part of this) there is nothing else to hold together, both horizontally and vertically, the complex living organism, which we call a civilization, a culture, a nation. The most recent history of the breakup of countries and the proliferation of new nations in large numbers, with others striving to achieve complete autonomy, if not full independence, teaches us that common language and common borders alone do not constitute a national entity, but there is only one glue which can hold them together as one, which are their common traditions, legends, practices, rituals, customs, and such.

As for the individualities of particular persons, especially exceptional persons, they ought to recognize the cohesiveness of national customs, and respect them, while their nation as a whole ought to recognize their exceptionality, protect them, like a good gardener protects a rare flower, and honor them as the best of what any nation, great or small, can offer to its posterity, and to the world at large.

Only such mutual recognition and respect constitutes national morality, any lack of it is immoral.

DIGGING, MINING, UNDERMINING

No wonder that I love Nietzsche so much. It is not just by “pure reason” that I admire his supremely sharp mind. I feel our affinity in affects, emotions, feelings, passions; I feel our affinity in the irrational elements of our spirits. (See my later entry Homo Irrationalis.) The metaphors which he applies to himself are somehow applicable to my own life, and his 1886 Preface to Morgenröte yields just another of such remarkable examples. Comparing himself to an assiduous subterrestrial mole-like being, he seems to describe my own mode of existence during the past several years, as I have been working also assiduously and subterrestrially on my book. Like himself, I might be called happy despite my labors in the dark (in the sense that I do not expect this work, summing up my whole life as an independent thinker, to ever see the light of day in public view). Like Nietzsche, I have easily unlearned how to hold my tongue having so long been a mole...  Even the rather unexpected reference to Trophonios, the little-known, deeply flawed Greek genius builder, eventually swallowed by the earth, has a special ring for me. I am not so much concerned about Trophonios the thief, which subject is addressed again at the end of this entry, as by Trophonios the outcast, finding his ultimate eternal shelter in the depths of the earth. Curiously, I suspect that Trophonios may actually have wished that fate for himself… At least, he had received a vindication of the ages by becoming immortalized in the legendary Oracle of Trophonios!

So, here is that amazing passage from Nietzsche’s 1886 Preface to Morgenröte (1):

In this book we find a subterrestrial at work, digging, mining, undermining. You can see him always, given that you have eyes for such deep work, how he makes his way slowly, cautiously, gently, but surely, without showing signs of the weariness that usually accompanies long privation of light and air. He might even be called happy, despite his labors in the dark. Does it not seem as if some faith were leading him on, some solace repaying him for his toil? Or that he himself desires a long period of darkness, an unintelligible, hidden, enigmatic something, knowing, as he does, that, in time, he is going to have his own morning, his own redemption, his own rosy dawn ? Yea, verily he will return: ask him not what he seeks in the depths; for he himself will tell you, this apparent Trophonios and subterrestrial, whenever he once again becomes man. One easily unlearns how to hold one’s tongue when one has for so long been a mole, and all alone, like him.

(For my readers’ convenience, to spare them the task of looking up Trophonios in the reference books, here is the pertinent passage on Trophonios in Bulfinch’s The Age of Fable:

Trophonios and Agamedes were brothers who were distinguished architects and built the temple of Apollo at Delphi and a treasury for King Hyprieos. In the wall of the treasury they placed a stone in such a manner that it could be taken out and by this means from time to time purloined the treasure. This amazed Hyprieos whose locks and seals were untouched, yet his wealth was diminishing. At length, he set a trap for the thief, and Agamedes was caught in it. Trophonios unable to extricate him and fearing that, when found, he would be tortured and compelled to reveal his accomplice, cut off Agamedes’ head. Trophonios himself is said to have been shortly afterwards been swallowed by the earth. The oracle of Trophonios at Lebadea in Bœotia, was said to be a chasm in the earth, leading into the deep underground cave by a very narrow passage.)

It is, therefore, understandable how a legend could be born of an eternal Trophonios living and working in the bowels of the earth, how Nietzsche appropriated the otherwise little-remembered person of Trophonios, and turned him into a metaphor, disregarding all the facts about him which did not fit the exact parameters of his metaphor, and how he thus had given Trophonios a new life, not as an erstwhile Greek mythological personality, but as the centerpiece of this Nietzsche metaphor, immortalized several millennia after his time, like an obscure early martyr, unexpectedly gaining prominence, having been discovered and canonized by a Saints-seeking Church.

NIETZSCHE'S DIVINA COMMEDIA

 

How large is the Pantheon? Chaqun à son goȗt. In Nietzsche’s case, one has to go through all his writings to find it out, here, there, and everywhere, in aggregate. This needs to be done keeping in mind that under no circumstances his merciless criticism of someone in one place should preclude the same person’s great praise in another.

Nietzsche says in Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche (408): “I, too, have been in the underworld, to speak with a few of the dead. Four pairs it was that did not deny themselves to my sacrifice--- Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. On these eight I fix my eyes, and see their eyes fixed on me. May the living forgive me that occasionally they appear to me as shadows, while those men seem so alive to me.” Such a tribute to these eight great philosophers (Goethe undoubtedly merits to stand in their illustrious company of philosophers, especially if Nietzsche says so, besides, to me, this is by no means surprising, as the Russian philosophy, at its best, comes out of literature and out of non-professional pursuits of the Russian intelligentsia, whereas professional philosophers as such are rather rare and not as interesting as the other ones, being too prone to heavy mysticism, at the expense of fine nuanced thinking) elevates them all to the highest status of genius.

The next question, however, is not why these eight, but where are the others? Why, we ought to ask, not a single Pre-Socratic philosopher, whom Nietzsche admires so much, has made the list? The answer is quite simple: he was writing on the spur of the moment, and saying “on these eight I fix my eyes,” he never meant “on these eight exclusively.” The proof of it is easily coming up right away. The Dantesque passage above was written by Nietzsche in 1879. In a later comment, in Jenseits 204, he writes this:

“…Altogether, it may have been the wretchedness of the most recent philosophy itself. Let us confess how utterly our modern world lacks the whole type of a Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles. It is especially the sight of the hodgepodge philosophers who call themselves philosophers of reality, or positivists, that is capable of injecting mistrust into the soul of an ambitious young scholar.”

In yet another place he writes: “My ancestors: Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe.” Apparently, the selection was not something permanently set in granite or marble. Besides, we all know about Nietzsche’s great interest in the person of Socrates, and where is he here? We can say, of course, that Socrates has been pretty much covered by Plato, but Nietzsche, ever so acutely personal, should not have neglected to contact him directly, and not through a middleman, even as distinguished as Plato himself. In his other references, Nietzsche was quite critical of Pascal and, especially, of Rousseau. Now, look whom he has chosen to keep him company! Apparently, Nietzsche is teaching us here another lesson, en passant. The greatness of the human mind and our respect for it ought not to be judged by how much we agree with what he says, but by how deeply that mind affects our own thinking and understanding of things.

As for our friend Nietzsche, it is perfectly clear that he is pretty careless about organizing his must-read list: the “Indispensable Eight” above may have been just lucky to find themselves in the right place of his head at the right time, as he happened to be writing on this subject. So did the four of his “ancestors,” at another time. How many greats of his has he failed to mention? But on the bright side of it, once they did get on his A-list with the kind of honorable mention that they received, their absolute importance has been established beyond reasonable doubt.

Finally, here is a brilliantly insightful statement of Nietzsche, which complements and expands everything I said above:

“…This attempt to relate the history of the earlier Greek philosophers is distinguished from similar efforts by its brevity. This has been accomplished by mentioning only a small number of the doctrines of every philosopher, i.e., by incompleteness. Those doctrines, however, have been selected in which the personal element of the philosopher reechoes most strongly; whereas a complete enumeration of all the possible propositions handed down to us, as is the custom in textbooks, merely results in one thing, the absolute silencing of the personal element. It is through this that those records become so tedious; for in systems that have been refuted it is only this personal element that can still interest us, for this alone is eternally irrefutable. It is possible to shape the picture of a person out of three anecdotes. I endeavor to bring into relief three anecdotes out of every system and abandon the remainder.” (From Nietzsche’s Later Preface to his Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the Greeks.)

Now, all this means that we should go after each single nugget wherever it can be found, and not after the whole mine, where the sheer volume of excavation overwhelms the best of our efforts.

 

SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL ON THE TRADER'S SCALE

Having wandered, somewhat ahead of time, into Part III of Nietzsche’s Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, we are getting back in line with Part II, Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche.

…This entry continues a previous discussion of totalitarianism, but this time not in the Collective section, which has a number of related entries already, but in this one, where the focus is on Nietzsche proper.

***

So far, I have elsewhere written extensively on the basic naturalness and undeniable moral legitimacy of the totalitarian concept as such (mind you, we are indeed talking about the concept of totalitarianism as a social choice, and, of course, from being natural, objectively moral, and legitimate, it by no means follows that everybody should like it), and now this is Nietzsche’s turn to join the debate indirectly. Here is one of innumerable Nietzschean passages which implicitly supports my seemingly outrageous, but logically unassailable argument. It is from Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche (#89):

“Mores and their victim. The origin of mores may be found in two thoughts: “Society is worth more than the individual,” and “Enduring advantage is to be preferred to ephemeral advantage,” from which follows that the enduring advantage of society must be given precedence over the advantage of the individual, especially over his momentary well-being, but equally over his enduring advantage, and even his continued existence. Mores must be preserved, sacrifices must be made, but such attitude originates only in those who are not its victims, for these claim that the individual may be worth more than many, and that present enjoyment may have to be valued higher than a pallid continuation of complacent states. The philosophy of the sacrificial animal, however, is always sounded too late; and so we retain mores (Sitte) and morality (Sittlichkeit), which is nothing more than the feeling for the whole quintessence of mores under which one lives and has been brought up-- brought up not as an individual, but as a member of a whole. Thus it happens constantly that an individual brings upon himself, by means of his morality, the tyranny of the majority.”

My reason for quoting this passage and making a special entry out of it has nothing to do with approving or disapproving of the totalitarian phenomenon, but just another proof that totalitarianism is not some unnatural aberration of a power-hungry clique of egotistic megalomaniacs, but a perfectly legitimate expression of the democratic will of the society. The utter idiocy of the universal “Will to Democracy,” if I am permitted, so ungraciously, to abuse Nietzsche’s terminological brilliance in describing the neoconservative perversion of very recent memory, is here exposed.

In a capsule, as I said before, it is extremely difficult for any American to understand the legitimacy of the popular roots of totalitarianism. The American-style democracy is splendid, but it the luxury of the rich and the lucky, whereas the rest of the world may be quite different. The rule cannot be measured by the yardstick of exceptions. If democracy as a meaningful term means people-power, the people’s choice is always to give the power to an exceptional individual of great strength and wisdom, which inclination some time ago was labeled the Leader Principle,..

...And lastly, why did I put On The Trader’s Scale in the title? The English-speaking world is known to have been adept in the “shopkeeper” logic (this is not according to a sneering Napoleon, but to a well-meaning Adam Smith!), hence a direct mental reference to one of the tools of that trade.

THE MOST DANGEROUS FOLLOWER

…Once we are inside The Wanderer and his Shadow, here is a splendid specimen of Nietzsche’s aphoristic brilliance:

(#290). The most dangerous follower.— The most dangerous follower is he whose defection would destroy the whole party: that is to say, the best follower.

The best manner in which Nietzsche’s brilliance may be honored here is not to play an admiration society, but to initiate an argument. Thus, in my view, the most dangerous follower is not necessarily a potential defector, but a potential hijacker: the one who does not go to the other side, but appropriates the leader’s cause (“the best follower,” remember!), and takes over the movement under his own auspices, reducing the former leader to the name only.

Examples? Just this one will suffice.--- Lenin was a hijacker of Marx…

Other examples, past and present, and the logical conclusions? Many, and to each taste!

Anyway, thank you, Nietzsche, for starting up a mind-warming fire!

THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW

Although Der Wanderer und sein Schatten comes after Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche in Nietzsche’s Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, this entry is such a natural follower of the previous one, Wanderers Or Travelers? that I am happily changing their order here, especially since they come under the same umbrella of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, where the chronology has been disrupted anyway.

***

(As a piece of pertinent trivia, our familiar word “planet” comes from the Greek word, meaning “wanderer.” Let us not forget either that through the power of our perennial cultural tradition we identify planets Uranus, Gaea, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Pluto […well, this one used to be thus identified for a while!], Mars, Venus and Mercury,--- with no less than the greatest gods and primeval titans of the ancient world.)

There is no mathematical knowledge to derive from it, but occasional trips into the misty world of intense symbolism and unabashed mysticism can do a lot of good to our imagination and the sense of the irrational, when taken with some detachment and in moderation. The Wanderer and his Shadow is a Nietzschean title, of course, and the trip we are undertaking in this fairly short (and therefore harmless) entry is into the world of wanderer and shadow, in their esoteric existence.

The Schubert song Der Wanderer, to the poem of Georg Philipp Schmidt von Lübeck pictures the wanderer as an utterly unhappy man who has chosen the life of wandering in his search for happiness. At the very end of his quest he finally gets his answer: “There where you are not, there is happiness!”

Apparently, the wandering hero cannot get close to happiness as she is fleeing him all the time, but his quest brings him closer to God, because he Wotan is also a wanderer, at least according to Wagner’s Siegfried. As we know of Nietzsche’s deep spiritual connection to Wagner (the later Nietzsche’s relentless repudiation of Wagner is further proof of that connection, as he was anxiously trying to free himself from that spell), there has to be a special connection to Wotan in Nietzsche’s Wanderer, a Hero emulating God.

And now we come to the mystical significance of the Wanderer’s Shadow. There are few words as heavily soaked in mystical symbolism than Shadow. The shadows of the dead geniuses, which Nietzsche communes with… Shadows as memories… Shadows as forces from the past projecting themselves onto the present and the future… But there is yet another meaning of Shadow coming to us from Richard Strauss’s and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s masterpiece Die Frau ohne Schatten. Shadow as a symbol of fertility and procreation: there is nothing but empty sterility in one deprived of her (or his?) shadow! It does not matter that the great opera was created decades after Nietzsche’s death. Hugo von Hofmannsthal did not conjure up his symbolism out of thin air. There is a powerful mystical bond between Wagner, Nietzsche and Strauss; and chronologicality and other such superficial silliness are powerless to break it or even put it in doubt. Therefore, we can speak of the symbolism of Nietzsche’s Wanderer and his Shadow by invoking the symbolism of Richard Strauss! And here is what we come up with:

The Wanderer and his Shadow is fertile human genius, finding no place on earth where he could be happy. His true place is that of an Eternal Wanderer, among the gods, and only by his detachment from this world can he arrive at his own happiness and in return bestow the happiness of his memory on the world through the fruit of his intellectual and spiritual procreation.

WANDERERS OR TRAVELERS?

(See the discussion of wanderer versus traveler in this entry in conjunction with the continuing discussion in my next entry The Wanderer And His Shadow.)

***

In Menschliches (638), Nietzsche makes this exceptionally profound distinction: “He who has come only in part to a freedom of reason cannot feel on earth other than as a wanderer, though not as a traveler toward a final goal, for this does not exist.”

Compare this to Christ’s peculiar command to His disciples, in Matthew 10:16¾“Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves.” The word sheep has long acquired unpleasant connotations, and to be sure, nobody wants to be a sheep. But isn’t it true that sheep, by their nature, are wanderers, rather than travelers toward a final goal?

It is hard to be a wanderer, perhaps, much harder than being a traveler, whose journey, even if endless, still promises the hope of an end. And here are yet further similarities between Nietzsche’s Menschliches (638) and St. Matthew’s rendering of the words of Christ:

“But he wants to observe and keep his eyes open for everything that actually occurs in the world…” (638)

“…Be ye therefore wise as serpents…” (Matthew 10:16)

“…therefore he must not attach his heart too firmly to any individual thing, (sic!) there must be something wandering within him, which takes its joy in change and transitoriness.” (638)

“Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves…” (Matthew 10:9-10)

“To be sure, such a man will have bad nights, when he is tired and finds closed the gates to the city that should offer him rest; perhaps in addition, as in the Orient, the desert reaches up to the gate; predatory animals howl now near, now far; a strong wind stirs; robbers lead off his pack-animals. Then for him the frightful night sinks over the desert like a second desert, and his heart becomes tired of wandering. If the morning sun then rises, glowing like a divinity of wrath, and the city opens up, he sees in the faces of its inhabitants, perhaps, more of desert, dirt, deception, uncertainty, than outside the gates -- and the day is almost worse than the night.” (638)

“…But beware of men: for they will deliver you up to the councils, and scourge you in their synagogues.” (Matthew 10:17)

As my life has turned out, I am myself a wanderer. Looking at my evolution of character over half-a-century or more, it could not have been otherwise…

THE GLORY AND THE FOLLY OF OUR CONVICTIONS

Sic venit, sic transit the glory, but the folly stays…

(This entry in the Nietzsche section was written almost a decade ago, and the present version is only slightly updated. Needless to say, I am an enemy of all rigid ideologies, which become substitutes of established great religions and undermine the moral foundations of the latter, while easily eroding the clear-cut distinction between “church” and state, taking us back to the dark ages. The entry reflects my view of both yesterday and today that the American ideology of neoconservatism, inextricably connected to the highly questionable doctrine of globalism, is harmful to American interest and to the future of international relations, where its natural antagonist, the forces of nationalism, have long and predictably acquired extreme and militant forms.)

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Paraphrasing Dickens, these are the best of traits, these are the worst of traits, or, as I keep reminding the reader, the very same thing appears very differently, when seen from different angles. People’s convictions are to be admired when we contrast them to opportunism and dissimulation. But, from time to time, or quite frequently, to tell the truth, history shows us convictions driven to dangerous excess, when they become synonymous with fanaticism, bigotry, narrow-mindedness. When such convictions become a person’s ideology, terrible things may be expected to happen, whether that person is in a position of enormous power, like the leader of a great nation, or an otherwise powerless maniac in possession of a deadly weapon. How readily would we, then, prefer people of no principles to the principled kind!

In Menschliches, Nietzsche points out a very special quality of such unquestioning, unthinking convictions being the worst enemies of truth:

(483). Enemies of truth . Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. In (511) he develops this short dictum a little further: Loyal to their convictions. The man who has a lot to do usually keeps his general views and opinions almost unchanged; as does each person who works in the service of an idea… He will never test the idea itself anymore; he no longer has time for it. Indeed, it is contrary to his interest even to think it possible to discuss it. In (630) he elaborates on this further still: Conviction is the belief that in some point of knowledge one possesses absolute truth. Such a belief presumes, then, that absolute truths exist; likewise, that the perfect methods for arriving at them have been found, and, finally, that every man who has convictions makes use of these perfect methods. All three assertions prove at once that the man of convictions is not the man of scientific thinking; he stands before us still in the age of theoretical innocence a child, however grownup he might be otherwise. But throughout thousands of years, people have lived in such childlike assumptions, and from out of them mankind’s mightiest sources of power have flowed. The countless people who sacrificed themselves for their convictions thought they were doing this for absolute truth. All of them were wrong: probably no man has ever sacrificed himself for truth; at least, the dogmatic expression of his belief will have been unscientific or half-scientific. But actually one wanted to be right as one thought he had to be right. To allow his belief to be torn from him meant to put his eternal happiness in question. With a matter of this extreme importance the “will” was all too audibly the intellect’s prompter. Every believer assumed he could not be refuted; if the counterarguments proved very strong, he could still always malign reason in general, and perhaps even raise as a banner of extreme fanaticism the credo quia absurdum est. It is not the struggle of opinions that has made history so violent, but rather the struggle of belief in opinions, that is, the struggle of convictions. If only those people who thought so highly of their conviction, who sacrificed all sorts of things to it and spared neither honor, nor body, nor life in its service, had devoted half of their strength to investigating by what right they clung to this or that conviction, how they had arrived at it,--- how peaceable the history of mankind would appear! How much more would be known! All the cruel scenes during the persecution of heretics would have been spared us for two reasons: first, because the inquisitors would above all have inquired within themselves, and got beyond the arrogant idea that they were defending the absolute truth; and secondly, because the heretics themselves would not have granted such poorly established tenets as those of all the sectarians and the “orthodox” any further attention, once they had investigated them.

In his later work Antichrist (54), Nietzsche posits skepticism as a remedy against the poison of convictions driven to excess: Do not let yourself be deceived: Great intellects are skeptical. The strength, the freedom, which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves as skepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners.

How timely, how urgently relevant! How many lives could have been saved if instead of pretending to read “Camus,” a certain American politician of recent memory would have been receiving his daily briefings on Nietzsche… Today he may be gone from public office, but the folly of his convictions proves too deep-rooted to ever be uprooted. Perhaps we should all, both the voters and the elected, be receiving regular reminders of Nietzsche’s immortal gem: “Men of convictions are prisoners,” as well as-- yes!-- Camus’ cautionary retelling of the ancient Greek myth about Sisyphus, warning us about certain absurdities of life…

US AND THEM

 

I remember how at a very young age I was reading a child’s adaptation of Homer’s Iliad, and replaying the Graeco-Trojan War with toy soldiers on the floor of my room. One of the things which struck me the most then was the fact that I was unable to identify one side as “us” and the other as “them.” I liked Achilles, but disliked Odysseus; I liked Hector, but disliked Paris… Ironically, switching from the Iliad to the Odyssey, the person of Odysseus became much more to my liking. How could this be possible? My mother explained it to me, by saying that there can be good people fighting against each other in a war, using Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard as an example. (She was virtually repeating to me word-for-word what Stalin had previously told my father Artem about Bulgakov’s great work.) But here is my friend Nietzsche talking about the Iliad along the same lines, and answering my question in his own inimitable manner.

The following Nietzschean passage, constituting Menschliches 45, is of immense psychological value both in application to particular individuals, and to society as a whole. It is well deserving to be quoted in full:

“Dual prehistory of good and evil. The concept of good and evil has a dual prehistory. First, in the soul of the ruling clans and castes. The man who has the power to requite goodness with goodness, and evil with evil, and really does practice requital by being grateful and vengeful, is called “good.” The person who is unpowerful, and cannot requite, is taken for bad. As a good man, one belongs to the “good,” a community that has a communal feeling, because all the individuals are entwined by their feeling for requital. A bad man belongs to the “bad,” to a mass of abject, powerless men who have no communal feeling. The good men are a caste; the bad men are a multitude, like particles of dust. Good and bad are for a time the same as noble and low, master and slave. Conversely, one does not regard the enemy as evil: he can requite. In Homer, both the Trojan and the Greek are good. Not he who does harm to us, but he who is contemptible is considered bad. In the community of the good, goodness is hereditary; it is impossible for a bad man to grow out of such good soil. Should one of the good men nevertheless do something unworthy of good men, one resorts to excuses; one blames God, for example, saying that he struck the good man with blindness and madness.

“Then, in the souls of the oppressed, the powerless. Here, all other human beings are considered bad, cruel, inconsiderate, exploitative, crafty, whether they be noble or base. Evil is their epithet for man, indeed, for every possible living being, even, for example, for a god. Human, Divine mean the same as devilish, evil. The signs of graciousness, helpfulness, pity are anxiously considered as malice, as preludes to a disastrous conclusion, soporifics, and craft, in short, as refined malice. With such a state of mind in the individual, a community can hardly come about at all, or at most in the crudest form. Wherever this conception of good and evil predominates, the ruination of individuals, their tribes and races, is near.

“Our current morality has grown on the soil of the ruling tribes and castes.”

Aside from the multitude of delightful nuances, which this passage contains, we may particularly note that the ability to requite goodness with goodness and evil with evil, according to the cultural traditions of such tribes, is the foundation of social justice, and consequently, only in such societies where this concept clearly predominates is social justice possible. It is therefore perfectly correct to point out as Nietzsche does that our current morality [being justice-centered] has grown on the soil of the ruling tribes and castes, whereas the morality of the oppressed recognizes no justice, and therefore, in all historical cases when the oppressed had actually taken power, it had always been transitional, and never institutional. In the best familiar to me case of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, it was the morality of the Russian Intelligentsia, which triumphed with Stalinism, the morality of the well-educated ruling elite. One may be horrified by the cruel practices of Stalinism, but one cannot deny it a consistent and essentially moral view, and likewise practice of justice.

 

LANGUAGE AND THE WORLD AS SUCH

The subject of language has been sort of “my own” ever since my Moscow University years. I used to study all important linguistic theories from Ivan (Jan) Baudouin de Courtenay and Ferdinand de Saussure to Louis Hjelmslev, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Noam Chomsky, and Yuri Lotman. One thing unhappily missing from my university curriculum however was Nietzsche’s take on linguistics: as original and insightful as the best of modern linguistic theories.

And here is our case in point. The following passage from Nietzsche’s Menschliches #11, is of a monumental linguistic and philosophical significance as he argues about the role of language as a credible representation of the world as-such… or, well, maybe not…

Language as an alleged science. The importance of language for the development of culture lies in the fact that in language man juxtaposed to the one world another one, of his own, a place which he thought was so sturdy that from it he could move the rest of the world from its foundations, making himself lord over it. To the extent that man believed over long periods of time in concepts and names of things as though they were aeternae veritates he has acquired that pride by which he has raised himself above the animals: he really did believe that in language he had knowledge of the world. (On Truth and Lies in the Extra-Moral Sense.) The shaper of language was not so modest as to think that he was only giving things labels. Rather, he imagined that he was expressing the highest knowledge of things with words; and in fact language is the first stage of scientific effort. Here, too, it is the belief in found truth, from which the mightiest sources of strength have flowed. Very belatedly it is only now dawning on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a monstrous error. Happily, it is too late to be able to revoke the development of reason, which rests on that belief.

And now Nietzsche makes an all-important generalization putting language in the same class with logic and mathematics, and demonstrating their abstracting detachment from reality.

Logic, too, rests on assumptions not corresponding to anything in the real world, like on the assumption of the equality of things, the identity of the same thing at different points of time; but this science arose from the opposite belief (that there were indeed such things in the real world). So it is with mathematics, which would certainly not have originated, had it been known from the beginning that there is no exactly straight line in nature, no real circle, no absolute measure.

The question, of course, remains, whether language (not in the sense of a labeling gun, but as a repository of the Kantian aprioris and such), along with man-made logic and mathematics, amounts to anything which can be proven as an “objective reality.”

…The answer is much more elusive than generally expected, and Nietzsche is hardly going to provide it for us, but he does offer a powerful push for the philosophy of linguistics in the right direction, to quicken our linguistic sensibilities more effectively than any bona fide professional linguist has been able to do so far.

INCOMPATIBLE OR SYMBIOTIC?

Nietzsche’s genius is especially attractive for its versatility and open-mindedness, which allows him to see the very same thing in totally different lights, depending on the time of day and the eye’s mood, sometimes very positively, sometimes very negatively, but always very interestingly. We have already noted before that there is no inconsistency here, or at least as much or as little of it as in all world folklore, or even in the Scriptures. There are two reasons why Nietzsche can express totally different opinions on the same subject. We might call them synchronic and diachronic. Synchronically, this effect can be reached by two different angles of vision, which allow him, and us, to see the same thing from different perspectives, and exhibiting different qualities under this type of scrutiny. Diachronically, however, we may be putting together two Nietzschean passages and marveling at their expression of very different opinions without realizing that these opinions belong to somewhat different Nietzsches, caught at two different “historical” stages of the man’s life.

Nietzsche comments on this general possibility, and most probably, necessity, in Menschliches (2), and he attributes such a failure to recognize the diachronic effect (the words synchronic and diachronic are chosen by me, they are not Nietzsche’s!) to a “congenital defect of philosophers,” which he then goes on to explain in the following manner:

“Philosophers suffer from the same defect: they start with present-day man and think that they can arrive at their goal by analyzing him. Instinctively they let ‘man’ hover before them as an aeterna veritas, something unchanging in all turmoil, a secure measure of things. But everything the philosopher asserts about man is no more than a statement about man within a very limited time span. A lack of historical sense is the congenital defect of all philosophers. Some even take the most recent form of man, as it developed under the imprint of certain religions, or even certain political events, as the fixed form, from which one must proceed. They would not understand that man has evolved, that the faculty of knowledge has also evolved, while some even permit themselves to spin the whole world from out of this faculty of knowledge.”

Applying this reasoning to Nietzsche, we may notice that some of his opinions change rather significantly in the course of his life, sometimes more than once. It is particularly noticeable in his attitude toward ob­jective scholarship. (This fact was observed and reported by the Canadian scholar Peter Preuss thirty years ago, or so; Walter Kaufmann offhandedly glosses over it; while Bertrand Russell’s snapshot of Nietzsche, although eminently commendable, offers no diachronic depth at all, which is not at all surprising and even understandable, as he has no intention of going further in-depth on this subject.) In Nietzsche’s early period (Geburt and Unzeitgemäßen) he finds “objective scholarship” too dry for human life, which requires the moisture and the nutrients only obtainable from subjective elements, which include illusion and allow error. But his Menschliches, Morgenröte, and Fröhliche belong to the Mittelspiel of Nietzsche’s life, where he speaks of the “objective science” favorably, while condemning all illusion. In his Endspiel, however, he goes back to his earlier position, epitomized by the phrase he coined in Unzeitgemäßen: “fiat veritas pereat vita,” which means that “truth,” that Holy Grail, which objective science is after, is deadly to life.

Coming back to Menschliches, one familiar mostly with Nietzsche’s later writings (or the earlier ones, for that matter) may be surprised to read the following excerpt from Menschliches (3):

Esteeming humble truths. It is the sign of a higher culture to esteem the little humble truths discovered by a strict method, rather than the gladdening and dazzling errors which originate in metaphysical and artistic ages and men. At first, one has scorn for humble truths, as if they could offer no match for the others: they stand modest, simple, sober, even discouraging, while the other truths are beautiful, splendid, enchanting, even enrapturing. But truths that are hard won, certain, enduring, and still of consequence for all further knowledge, are higher; to keep to them is manly, shows bravery, simplicity, restraint. Eventually, not only the individual, but all mankind will be elevated to this manliness, when men finally grow accustomed to the greater esteem for durable, lasting knowledge and lose all belief in inspiration and seemingly miraculous communication of truths. The admirers of forms (artists and aesthetes, as opposed to scientists), with their standard of beauty and sublimity, will surely have good reason to mock at first, when esteem for humble truths and scientific spirit first comes to rule, but only because either their eye has not yet been opened to the charm of the simplest form, or because men raised in that spirit have not yet been fully and inwardly permeated by it, so that they continue thoughtlessly to imitate old forms (poorly, like one who no longer really cares about the matter). Previously, the mind was not obliged to think rigorously; its importance lay in spinning out symbols and forms. This has changed: that importance of symbols has become the sign of lower culture. Just as our arts are becoming ever more intellectual, and our senses more spiritual, and as that which is sensually pleasant to the ear is judged quite differently now than a hundred years ago, so the forms of our life become more spiritual, to the eye of older times uglier, but only because it is unable to see how the realm of the internal, spiritual beauty is continually deepening and expanding, and to what extent a glance full of intelligence can mean more now than the most beautiful human body and the most sublime edifice.

I am not surprised however by how different this passage reads from others, written earlier or later. I expect surprises from Nietzsche, and I get them all the time, as I become surprised by the inexhaustible novelty of his writing, but not by the fact that it is novel and inexhaustible. Being inconsistent both synchronically and diachronically is part of his strength and of his charm. Nietzsche is a great artist, rather than a scientist, and I am not surprised either, by the fact that his defense of objective science was, with him, not of a long duration.

But let us stay on with his defense of objective science in Menschliches, with this passage (6), which I have already quoted in my entry Science, Philosophy, And Religion As One, in the Philosophy Section, plus also (7), which in this case sums up (6) very elegantly:

(6). The scientific spirit is powerful in the part, but not in the whole. The distinct, smallest fields of science are treated purely objectively. On the other hand, the general, great sciences as a whole pose the question, a very unobjective question: what for, to what benefit? Because of this concern about benefit, men treat the sciences less impersonally as a whole than in their parts. Now in philosophy, which is the top of the whole scientific pyramid, the question of the benefit of knowledge is posed automatically. Every philosophy has an unconscious intention of ascribing to knowledge the greatest benefit. Therefore, all philosophies have so much high-flying metaphysics, and wariness of the seemingly insignificant explanations of physics. For the importance of knowledge for life must appear as great as possible. Here we have an antagonism between individual scientific fields and philosophy. The latter, like art, wishes to render the greatest possible depth and meaning to life and activity. In sciences, one seeks knowledge and nothing more, whatever may be the consequences… Until now, there has been no philosopher in whose hands philosophy has not become an apology for knowledge. In this way everyone is an optimist, by thinking that knowledge must be accorded the highest usefulness. All philosophers are tyrannized by logic: and logic, by its nature, is optimism.

(7.) The troublemaker in science. Philosophy divorced from science when it inquired, which knowledge of the world and life could help man live most happily. This occurred in the Socratic schools: out of concern for happiness, man tied off the veins of scientific investigation and does so still today.

And finally, via Nietzsche, we shall raise the same old question again for the purpose of answering it with added vigor: are science and philosophy (which in this case ought to include religion) utterly incompatible or compatible, at least in part? The answer is that their seeming incompatibility is an illusion, caused by a human error, whereas, in fact, they are not only compatible, but symbiotic.

By the same token, an interesting parallel can be made with Nietzsche’s views of objective and subjective scholarship over the years. Those have been changing ostensibly back and forth, but it may be instructive to examine them on account of their compatibility, which examination will then convince us that they are not only compatible, but also symbiotic, both literally and figuratively speaking.

PUTTING NIETZSCHE THE IMMORALIST ON THE STAND

Yet again, I am quoting from Nietzsche’s 1886 Preface to Menschliches in the 1878 chronological slot for Nietzsches Werke, in order to preserve the integrity of Menschliches as a single piece.

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I have been coming to Nietzsche’s defense against the charges of being unpleasant on many occasions, but it is occasionally quite useful to put your client on the stand, using his own testimony in his defense. There is no more convincing evidence in this regard than Nietzsche’s 1886 Preface to Menschliches, we already quoted from in the previous entry, but we will do it again, from a different part and for a very good reason. So, read this important excerpt if only to realize that my “defense of Nietzsche” is not only an expression of a personal opinion, but a simple case of taking Nietzsche himself at his word.

The quoted passage is rather long, but I would hate to make it any shorter, even where it is feasible on the technical grounds, for fear of doing damage to his incomparable poetic style:

Often, and always with great consternation, people have told me that there is something distinctive in all my writings from The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt… was published in 1872) to the most recently published Prologue to a Philosophy of the Future (“Vorspiel…” is the subtitle of Jenseits, published in 1886). All of them, I am told, contain snares and nets for careless birds, and an almost constant, unperceived challenge to reverse one’s habitual estimations and esteemed habits. ‘What’s that? Everything is only human, all too human? With such a sigh one comes from my writings, they say, with a kind of wariness and distrust even toward morality, indeed, tempted and encouraged to become the spokesman for the worst things ¾ might they, perhaps, be only the best slandered? My writings have been called a School for Suspicion, even more for Contempt, yet also for Courage and Daring. Truly, I do not believe that anyone has ever looked into the world with such deep suspicion, and not only as an occasional devil’s advocate, but, to speak theologically, as an enemy and challenger of God. Whoever guesses something of the consequences of deep suspicion, of the chills and fears stemming from isolation, to which any man burdened with an unconditional difference of viewpoint is condemned, such person will understand how often I have tried to take shelter somewhere, to recover from myself, as if to forget myself entirely for some time (in some sort of reverence, or enmity, or scholarliness, or frivolity, or stupidity); and he will also understand why, when I could not find what I needed, I had to gain it by force artificially, to counterfeit it, or to create it poetically. And what have poets ever done otherwise? And why else do we have all the art in the world? What I always needed the most to cure and restore myself however was the belief that I was not the only one to be thus, to see thus, I needed the intuition of kinship and equality in eye and in desire, repose in trusted friendship; I needed a shared blindness, with no suspicion or question marks, a pleasure in foregrounds, surfaces, what is near, what is nearest, in everything that has color, skin, appearance. Perhaps one could accuse me of some sort of art, of various sorts of finer counterfeiting such as that I had deliberately closed my eyes to Schopenhauer’s blind will to morality (in Schopenhauer as Educator. For his later response, see Aphorism 39) at a time, when I was already clear-sighted about morality; that I deceived myself about Wagner’s incurable romanticism (in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, for his later response see the Aphorisms 164, 165, 215, 219), as if it were a beginning and not an end; similarly, about the Greeks; similarly about the Germans and their future, and there might be a whole long list of such similarlies. But even if this were true, and I was accused with good reason, what could you know about the amount of self-preserving cunning, reason, and higher protection that is contained in such self-deception, and how much falseness I still require to keep permitting myself the luxury of my truthfulness?

Enough, I am still alive; and life has not been devised by morality: it lives on deception, but wouldn’t you know it? Here I am, beginning again, doing what I have always done, the old immoralist and bird-catcher, I am speaking immorally, extra-morally, Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Here in this context both translations of Jenseits are justified in English, be that as “beyond” in the sense of “transcending” or as “on the other side” in the sense of “crossing the river of morality from one side to the other.” Considering that the customary Russian “exact” translation from German as “On The Other Side” still constitutes my personal preference, and Nietzsche’s elucidation here in no way contradicts my insistence on it, my Jenseits-related comments will all remain in place without any further need to justify my preference of the one over the other.

It is worthwhile to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that all my major lines of Nietzsche’s defense in other places, such as playing the devil’s advocate, courage and daring, the poetic license, and such, have been mentioned by Nietzsche himself, and in the question of trusting his complete honesty versus possible clever dissimulation, I am opting on the side of his complete honesty, as all Nietzsche’s deep faults, grave sins and unforgivable transgressions in the eyes of his uncharitable critics are consistent only with honesty and in no way with any kind of disingenuous dissimulation…

BIRTH AND REBIRTH OF FREE SPIRITS

(No need to inform the reader that this is a tongue-in-cheek, yet eminently instructive entry, whose aim is much more than mere amusement.)

Friedrich Nietzsche inventing Der Freigeist, the Free Spirit? After all, didn’t Al Gore invent the Internet, and didn’t George W. Bush with Natan Sharansky’s help invent Democracy? Indeed, and here is Nietzsche ipse, inventing the Free Spirit, by his own admission, in the 1886 Preface to Menschliches (as I put it down in shorthand), first published under this title in 1878:

"Thus I invented, when I needed them, the free spirits too, to whom this heavyhearted book Human, All Too Human is dedicated. There are no such free spirits, but, as I said, I needed their company at the time, to be of good cheer in the midst of bad things (illness, isolation, foreignness, sloth, inactivity), as brave fellows and specters to chat and laugh with, when one feels like it, and whom one sends to hell when they become boring: as a reparation for lacking friends. That there could someday be such free spirits, that Europe will have such lively, daring fellows among its sons of tomorrow and after-tomorrow ¾ real and palpable, and not merely, as in my case, phantoms and a hermit’s shadow play: I am the last person to want to doubt it. I already see them coming, slowly, and, perhaps, I am doing something to hasten their coming, as I describe, before the fact, the conditions I see giving rise to them, the paths, on which I see them coming?"

What a magnificent invention! What imagination! I bow my head to the genius who, lacking the luxury of contemporary and real friendships, had invented his own “friends of the future,” without ever relinquishing his friendships with the dead, as evidenced for instance by his communion with the dead souls, in Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche (408)…

THE MEANING OF WAGNER

(This is my third and last entry on Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen: #4: Richard Wagner In Bayreuth.)

Turning this into a separate entry, I still have a lingering doubt whether I was right to separate it from the previous one: after all, Nietzsche’s uniquely original interpretation of Wagner’s Ring continues here!... But then, indeed, Nietzsche’s enormously powerful conclusion to the above, does stand apart from the rest, and thus deserves a separate entry.---

"And now ask yourselves, ye generation of today,--- Was all this composed for you? Have ye the courage to point up to the stars of the whole of this heavenly dome of beauty and goodness and to say: “this is our life, that Wagner has transferred to a place beneath the stars”?

Where are the men among you who are able to interpret the divine image of Wotan in the light of their own lives, and who can become ever greater while, like him, ye retreat? Who among you would renounce power knowing and having learned that power is evil? Where are they who, like Brunhilde, abandon knowledge to love, and finally rob their lives of the highest wisdom, “afflicted love, deepest sorrow, opened my eyes”? Where are the free and fearless, developing and blossoming in innocent egoism? Where are the Siegfrieds, among you?

He who questions thus and does so in vain, will find himself compelled to look around him for signs of the future; and should his eye, on reaching an unknown distance, espy just that “people” which his own generation can read out of the signs contained in Wagnerian art, he will, then, also understand what Wagner shall mean to this people—something that he cannot be to all of us, namely, not the prophet of the future, as perhaps he would fain appear to us, but the interpreter and clarifier of the past."

I guess, the question to myself ought to be whether I can in any way identify with Wotan. The honest answer is: no, I don’t think so. But the very next question is whether I can understand Wagner at all, and I think I can, which is surely the solid ground for my coming-soon extended comment. Until then this entry may be considered of no value, except for drawing the reader’s attention to Nietzsche’s little-known, but very valuable text. In this latter sense it surely serves its edificational purpose.

THE RING ACCORDING TO NIETZSCHE

This is my second entry on Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen: #4: Richard Wagner In Bayreuth.

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As an admirer of Wagner’s Ring (not just as a set of four operas, but as a monumental music drama), I find the following superlatively fascinating and enlightening. This is none other than Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Ring in Chapter XI of Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen: Richard Wagner In Bayreuth. My commentary on this passage will follow at the next opportunity, but meantime let Nietzsche take the floor all by himself. The greatest and most delightful surprise, which is of course expected from Nietzsche, is that his main hero in the Cycle is Wotan, which, come to think of it, makes perfect sense, as soon as we are prepared to treat the Ring as a four-part whole, rather than as a collection of separate pieces.---

In the Ring of the Nibelung the tragic hero is a god whose heart yearns for power, and who, since he travels along all roads in search of it, finally binds himself to too many undertakings, loses his freedom, and is ultimately cursed by the curse inseparable from power. He becomes aware of his loss of freedom owing to the fact that he no longer has the means to take possession of the golden Ring—that symbol of all earthly power, and also of the greatest dangers to himself as long as it lies in the hands of his enemies. The fear of the end and the twilight of all gods overcomes him, as also the despair at being able only to await the end without opposing it. He is in need of the free and fearless man who, without his advice or assistance—even in a struggle against gods—can accomplish single-handed what is denied to the powers of a god. He fails to see him, and just as a new hope finds shape within him, he must obey the conditions to which he is bound: with his own hand he must murder the thing he most loves, and purest pity must be punished by his sorrow. Then he begins to loathe power, which bears evil and bondage in its lap; his will is broken, and he himself begins to hanker for the end that threatens him from afar off. At this juncture something happens which had long been the subject of his most ardent desire: the free and fearless man appears, he rises in opposition to everything accepted and established, his parents atone for having been united by a tie which was antagonistic to the order of nature and usage; they perish, but Siegfried survives. And at the sight of his magnificent development and bloom, the loathing leaves Wotan’s soul, and he follows the hero’s history with the eye of fatherly love and anxiety. How he forges his sword, kills the dragon, gets possession of the ring, escapes the craftiest ruse, and awakens Brunhilde; how the curse abiding in the ring gradually overtakes him; how, faithful in faithfulness, he wounds the thing he most loves, out of love; becomes enveloped in the shadow and cloud of guilt, and, rising out of it more brilliantly than the sun, ultimately goes down, firing the whole heavens with his burning glow and purging the world of the curse,—all this is seen by the god whose sovereign spear was broken in the contest with the freest man, and who lost his power through him, rejoicing greatly over his own defeat: full of sympathy for the triumph and pain of his victor, his eye burning with aching joy looks back upon the last events; he has become free through love, free from himself.

Now, once again. If you were to pick for yourself the main hero of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, who would it be? Putting this question in such a way, we come to the obvious conclusion that at least in this choice Nietzsche is perfectly correct… No wonder Wagner himself admittedly liked Nietzsche’s exposition.