THE RULE MORE INTERESTING THAN THE EXCEPTION. PART I.

We, people who want to rise above the crowd, like to see ourselves as exceptional, as opposed to the crowd, who are the rule. Proudly applying to ourselves the beaten cliché we eat to live whereas they live to eat. We are the cream of the human race, and what fool should ever imagine that under any circumstances we can be not as interesting as they are? Well, Nietzsche is that blessed fool, and here is our case in point, Jenseits 26:

“Every choice human being strives for a citadel and a secrecy, where he is saved from the crowd, the many, where he may forget men who are the rule, being their exception, except only the one case, in which he is pushed straight to them as a seeker after knowledge in the great and exceptional sense. Then, one day, as he remains proudly hidden in his citadel, he would say to himself, “The devil take my good taste! But the rule is more interesting than the exception, myself, the exception!” And he would go down and, above all, he would go inside… The long and serious study of the average man constitutes a necessary part of every philosopher’s life-history, perhaps, the most disagreeable, odious and disappointing part. If he is fortunate, he will encounter suitable shortcuts and helps for his task; I mean so-called cynics, who simply recognize the animal, the commonplace, the rule in themselves. Cynicism is the only one form in which the base souls approach honesty and the higher man must listen closely, and congratulate himself.”

But, distancing ourselves from this remarkable Nietzschean passage, let us ask ourselves in earnest: can the rule be indeed more interesting than the exception?

To this I can reply with conviction that under certain circumstances this is indeed the case, and, going even further, I shall add, not only more interesting, but more important as well, and here is my argument.

In fact, there are two arguments here, objective and subjective. Objectively speaking, we ought to stipulate that only an exceptional person can properly judge whether a certain human phenomenon is interesting or not, whereas the common person does not have a sufficient understanding of such things to make the proper judgment. But, in so far as an exceptional person is concerned, the other members of his exceptional club are not too different from himself, having their exceptionality in common with each other. Going even further, we may assert that each such person projects his own exceptionality on the exceptionality of the others, and in this sense, all exceptions are alike and, frankly, not that interesting to each other, being specimens of the same species.  Incidentally, and in direct conjunction with this, I have come up with the following useful aphorism:

The greatest patriot is an exceptional person who is capable of identifying himself with his unexceptional fellow countrymen more than with other members of his own international ‘exceptional’ club, species una sumus, transcending all national borders.

Now, if any of these exceptional personalities (as the reader may have guessed, we are returning to them!) should be looking for a rare avis, the most honest and philosophically consistent among them will find his bird among the unfamiliar rule, rather than among the familiar exception, and this is exactly what Nietzsche may have had in mind, writing his Jenseits 26.

To be continued.