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.