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.
***
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…
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