SOCIETY STINKS?

(As a note for the record, this entry’s title is a deliberate allusion to the title of the Mel Brooks 1991 film Life Stinks. I am sure that when the reader reads this entry, the natural connection will be obvious.)

Jenseits 26 and Jenseits 30 are not exactly neighbors in Nietzsche’s book, but they have become neighbors in my two entries, this and the previous one. In fact, they are both closely united by their leitmotif, which is the elitism of the exceptional personality, and the present entry picks up where the last one left off.

Nietzsche’s Jenseits 30 is loaded with themes of utmost significance and some of my comments, placed in different sections of this book, reflect their variety and profundity. Let us look at them, briefly, one by one, until we come to the society stinks part, which is the culmination of everything said before.

The higher man, according to Nietzsche, is so much different from the lower man that not only are their respective angles of vision in direct opposition to each other, but what is nourishment to the higher man is a poison to the lower man; what is uplifting for the higher man is dangerous for the lower man, even the air around them is different: it is pure around the higher man, but foul and stinky around the lower man.

Our highest insights must-- and should-- sound like follies, and sometimes like crimes, when they are heard without permission by those who are not predisposed and predestined for them… The difference between the exoteric and esoteric, known to philosophers who believe in the order of rank, and not in equality and equal rights, does not so much consist in the exoteric coming from the outside and not from the inside, but that it sees things from below, whereas the esoteric looks down from above. There are heights of the soul, from which even tragedy ceases to look tragic… What serves the higher type of men as nourishment must almost be poison for a very different and inferior type. The virtues of the common man might signify vices and weaknesses in a philosopher… There are books that have opposite values for soul and health. Where the people eat and drink, even where they venerate, it usually stinks. One should not go to church, if one wants to breathe pure air. (Jenseits 30.)

Who else, but Nietzsche, could have said it, especially, in the way he says it! Here is the dream of spiritual hermits: to be justified on the grounds of physiological reason! You simply stay away from where it stinks. Pure air is good for health, and here Nietzsche’s distinction of opposite values for soul and health, all of a sudden, looks no longer as a distinction to a philosopher, unless he is motivated by extreme ‘ressentiment’ for the “plebs.” As for his attitude to the air in church, which seeps through the last sentence of the passage above, he is absolutely right if the kind of church he knows from his own experience is something like what Kierkegaard has in mind, or any critic of religious hypocrisy, for that matter.

Needless to say, I am talking about the figurative stench, making no judgment on the physiological stench, which, I understand, can vary from place to place, regardless of what Nietzsche says.

There was a different air of spirituality in a different type of church: the Russian church of my Soviet experience, which is again consistent with Kierkegaard, whom the Russians have always revered for this reason. It was always exceptionally pure in the figurative sense (no hypocrisy without political power!), and, quite naturally, due to the traditional practice of the Orthodox Russian service, always filled with the distinctive pleasant fragrance of the incense, which I shall always remember with a nostalgic trepidation. (The shrewd Keepers of the Faith and of the Nation, about whom I was writing in my Russia Article, knew exactly what they were doing, when they surrendered the Russian spirit to a forcible purification by fire, in 1917, and in subsequent years.

The subject discussed so far touches upon our discussion of patriotism in the previous entry, which we can now reformulate in the following manner: An exceptional personality is radically different from his lowly compatriot in many substantial ways, and very much alike his elite peers among other nations (at least, we are talking within the parameters of our Western ‘European’ Civilization), but does his membership in the international club of the elite exempt him from fighting against his foreign co-members in the trenches of a war between the nations? And similarly, doesn’t his estrangement from the bulk of his national roots uproot him from his native soil, rendering him isolated and vulnerable, unable to receive the nourishment that his wholesome countrymen are receiving, and without which his exceptional nourishment transforms itself into a long-acting deadly poison, which will destroy him in the long run?

It is under this angle that we must read both Jenseits 26 and 30, otherwise, we may find Nietzsche’s food poisonous in itself, whereas immunized by a proper perspective, we shall find it to be a cure from many an incurable disease…