"WHY I AM A DESTINY."

This entry’s title coincides with Nietzsche’s own title in Ecce Homo for the passage quoted below, and for a good reason. My principal task here, as befits this whole Nietzsche section, is not to draw attention to any of my personal ideas, but to Nietzsche as a person, and also to the reason why he calls himself “a destiny.” The structure of the following paragraphs is borrowed from my Sources & Comments format, but I see no other way at this time how to do this better.

(1). I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous--- a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite. --- Yet for all that, there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion: religions are affairs of the rabble; I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people. [Here again Nietzsche kind of goes over the line, refusing to recognize the simple fact that religion is, above all, the ethical foundation of each great culture. But perhaps, he is too preoccupied (à la Kierkegaard) with his personal ressentiment toward the hypocrisy of religion, and, of course, I see nothing wrong with that, because I will always take this kind of magnificent subjectivity over anybody’s fake all-through, and grotesquely self-important exercise in the so-called objectivity!] I want no “believers”; I think I am too malicious to believe in myself; I never speak to masses. [Compare this to my thoughts about the uselessness of speaking to the “followers”, who only listen to their leaders, and that, instead, one must attempt to reeducate the leaders!] I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy: you will guess why I publish this book before; it shall prevent people from doing mischief with me.

I don’t want to be a holy man; sooner even a buffoon. Perhaps I am a buffoon. But my truth is terrible; for so far one has called lies truth.

Revaluation of all values: my formula for an act of supreme self-examination on the part of humanity that has become flesh and genius in me. It is my fate that I have to be the first decent human being that I know to stand in opposition to the mendaciousness of the millennia. I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies. Revaluation of all values… Once again, compare this idea to my appeal for a critical reassessment of all basic terms and their applications: Nietzsche would have appreciated my Lecture Summary on International Justice! By the same token, I see his call for a revaluation not as a call to abolish old values, but to reexamine them, clean them up and exorcise them from the hypocrisy of the millennia and then, perhaps, they can be restored to their original pristine condition.

For all that, I am necessarily also the man of calamity. For, when truth enters into a fight with the lies of the millennia we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of. The concept of politics will have merged entirely with a war of spirits; all power structures of the old society will have been exploded: all of them are based on lies: there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth. It is only beginning with me (it pains me even to make this comment here, as in many other places elsewhere, where I am not doing it at all, that throughout Ecce Homo, Nietzsche’s final bow to his reader, the evidence of a progressing mental illness including such sudden flashes of pathological megalomania are becoming excruciatingly more and more apparent) that the earth knows great politics.

This presents a great temptation to see Nietzsche as a genius psychic, predicting things that are to come to pass, which he is not. Yes, the twentieth century would indeed be the age of unprecedented wars, but they are not Nietzsche’s wars, they are only accidental coincidences, and in his great prophesies of this passage he himself is only a Utopian, nothing more. Mediocrity has always carried the day, and in the end it comes down to a status quo, a new scenery and decorations, a new Christmas Tree, and perhaps some newer Tree decorations, but the old Christmas, the old status quo, going over and over again. I have no problem with Nietzsche’s hopeless idealism here, his subjectivity, even in error, is the only way to be a philosopher. But, mind you, the time has not borne out his predictions, there is no ‘Zarathustra’ yet to come, except that old perennial genius who has been physically dead now for over a century, yet spiritually alive and well for all time. Whereas the great object of his indignation, Christianity, has not changed so much, and today is very much alive and very well in Russia, because, and this is what Nietzsche the genius has failed to recognize, great religions, like Christianity, are not so much about a particular religion, as they are about the national culture rooted in it, and they ought to be always seen in that light!