(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)…
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