Megan Mook
When
we encounter both the man and philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, we do so
under the echoes of a vast array of misinterpretations, pledges from a mass of
ideologies that claim his support (anti-Semites and philo-Semites alike), most
of which are still being clarified and debated today.
However, even in these attempts at clarification, there is an alluring
temptation to approach this ambiguous figure with self-assurance, presupposing a
familiarity with such formidable and attention deserving concepts as the
Ubermench, the will to power, and the eternal recurrence of the same.
Hence, even after Walter Kauffman began his project of re-translating
Nietzsche’s texts in the early 1950’s (ridding them of literal errors as
well illuminating various shades of nuance), the full comport of his
philosophies is still becoming known. This paper will thereby aim to dissolve
the crudest of our misconceptions and at the same time elucidate some of his
more complex movements of thought. Through
contextualizing his thought in other influential philosophy, I hope to enrich
our conceptions of him as a thinker, as well the era that bore him.
Finally, this paper will examine Nietzsche’s own views of decadence,
relating them to the more overarching conceptions of and within his
philosophies.
Nietzsche
willing admitted the profound influences that both Schopenhauer and Wagner had
on him, both of whom he later declared as ultimately disloyal to life. One may
turn to his texts to find supports for his split with both of these men, but of
the two he dedicates much more commentary to Wagner, whom he once admired not
only
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“The sad truth is that we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves . . . the axiom ‘each man is farthest away from himself’ will hold us for all eternity. Of ourselves, we are not ‘knowers’”
as
a musician but as a friend. The rift that developed between their philosophies
is the jumping board from which Nietzsche’s
most profound concepts soar. Here,
I’m choosing to outline some basic dimensions of Schopenhauer’s thought so
that we may see how their flows reached Nietzsche’s own thought.
As for Wagner, we will not here take the time to consider his music
separately, but rather will incorporate him into our later discussion of
Nietzsche’s philosophy, specifically in terms of decadence.
What
most struck Nietzsche was Schopenhauer’s move away from the reason that
characterized the seventeenth century to a subjective or relativist philosophy. As a post Kantian thinker, Schopenhauer begins from the
premise that we live in a phenomenal world and that the absolute cannot be
grasped by rational measure, thus his statement ‘the world is my idea,’ from
which follows his work The World as Will
and Idea. In searching for the significance of this idea, Schopenhauer’s
retort is resounding and definitive: will. Present in everything: man, animals,
plants and crystals, will is the innermost nature of all; it is also its whole.
Everything is at the pleasure of will; it commands all, is the motivation
for all, from our brains to our sexual organs.
Thus Schopenhauer’s vision of the world, where he saw the world as
responding to this unmotivated, unevaluated life-urge, was always at variance
with itself. Man’s consciousness similarly fell under this life-urge and was
seen as governed by this distinct force, namely will.
We of course recognize the import of this philosophy as seen later in the
work of Freud. In addition,
Schopenhauer can also be said to have anticipated the Darwinian concepts of
evolution. If the world is ultimately will, and will is life, then like life,
the world is always becoming; this constant becoming is of course coupled with
destruction; a constant
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“It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. Do you have to salt your truth so heavily that it does not even quench your thirst any more?”
becoming
governs this causeless life-urge. Thus
we see how Schopenhauer removed a definitive aim from becoming (or more broadly
life) and rendered movement onward, but not upward. It was this aspect of his
philosophy, this nihilism, which attracted Nietzsche.
Tangled in his own concept of will, Schopenhauer sought a way out for he
said that “So long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we
are given up to the throng of desires with their constant hopes and fears, so
long as we are the subjects of willing, we can never have happiness or peace”
(Masur 49) He accepted two alternatives, one temporary (art) and the other
permanent (religious asceticism). Widely
remembered as a philosopher of art, Schopenhauer’s ideas, although highly
romantic, still remain an evocative interpretation of the role of art in man’s
life. It is in art that we
are freed from the constant suffering of will, and
the pleasure that we are always seeking comes unsolicited. However, truly
great art can be said to do more than suspend suffering; it brings more than a
peace which is only the response to want. Of similarly romantic strains are
Schopenhauer’s exaltations of music, which he conceived not as the copy of
ideas, but the enactment of will itself: “The
composer reveals the inner nature of the world and expresses the deepest wisdom
in a language which his reason does not understand . . . Music, therefore, if
regarded as an expression of the world, is in the highest degree of a universal
language” (Masur 50). Nietzsche was immensely attracted to Schopenhauer’s
claims about music, as was Wagner. The divine status to which Schopenhauer and subsequently
Nietzsche attributed to music accounted for part of the grandeur of
Nietzsche’s break with Wagner.
However,
even for Schopenhauer the universal language of music, as beautiful
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“Whoever
does not know how to find his ideal
lives more frivolously and imprudently than the man without an ideal”
as it may be, merely delivered him
temporary reprieve in whose wake one was still confronted with will.
In response, he declared that no true peace could come from
outside of morality. His teachings
that follow clearly resemble popular culture interpretations of Buddhism, yet in
fact they differ significantly, the ways in which we will not here discuss.
On Schopenhauer’s path to ethical awakening, first man beings to
realize that life consists of vain struggling in the face of constant passing away. He then
comes to understand all mankind as suffering, through which he experience the
virtue of compassion. The suffering
can only be overcome once man has disavowed his nature through asceticism. It is
through the negation of the self that man may find salvation from will, which
leaves only nothingness. Freed from
his ties to the world, nothing further will plague man, and thus he will not be
subject to the will, which is himself, the world and life itself. Sensing
destructive danger for human life, Schopenhauer’s glorification of such
virtues as compassion, self-denial and self-sacrifice colored Nietzsche’s
horizon with a red flare. He
distinctly saw Schopenhauer as having turned away from life, and out of fear for
the state of humanity, Nietzsche fired back, spouting provocative bullets
directly at morality.
Nietzsche believed that it was precisely morality, exemplified in
Schopenhauer by asceticism, that is responsible for man’s failure in reaching
his highest potential. Asceticism, claims Nietzsche in The
Genealogy of Morals, is an attempt to use energy to block the very sources
of life energy.
Here the eye looks enviously and malevolently on all biological growth and on its principle expressions, beauty and joy, while it gazes with delight on all that is misshapen or stunted . . . We are face to face with a deliberate split, which gloats on its own discomfiture and grows more self-assured and triumphant the more its biological energy decreases (GM, 254).
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“Rule as a riddle –‘if the bond shan’t burst – bite upon it
first’”
Here
the emphasis on biological strength clearly illustrates the influence of
Darwinian thought, but let us be wary of hastily proposing Nietzsche as an
evolutionist advocate who saw asceticism only as a ‘gratuitous sacrifice.’
Nietzsche, instead, understood responses such as asceticism as
misdirected efforts in maximizing our beings, efforts that have been necessary,
but through which we must break away if we are to realize our highest
capacities. He admired
Schopenhauer for his honesty in confronting human existence, namely his ability
to accept nothingness; however, Nietzsche did not seek to escape ourselves, to
hide from our fears. In The Birth of
Tragedy, he evokes Greek Tragedy as a means of affirming the subtle beauty
of life, the joy, that exists in and along side the cruelty and suffering. Here
again we see how firmly Nietzsche was rooted in his time as he too turned to the
Greeks for example, searching for means with which to rejuvenated the spirit.
How then does Nietzsche resolve Schopenhauer’s nihilism, for
admonishing asceticism and seeking to affirm the beauty of life is not enough to
constitute a sufficient break from the tutorial influences of Schopenhauer.
Nietzsche himself criticizes Schopenhauer for his nihilism; yet have we
not always been told that it is this same Nietzsche who himself is the champion
philosopher of nihilism? Traditionally,
nihilism has been used to describe the notion that the real is that which we
have access to – only what is perceptible to our senses, that is only beings
that one can experience oneself, constitute the real. This leads to a rejection
of traditional values, for they posit the real outside of experience.
This philosophical move is referred to as positivism, and this is a very
different nihilism than the one to which Nietzsche refers. For Nietzsche,
nihilism is not a specific viewpoint put forward by someone; rather it is a
historical
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“The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: it helps one through many a dreadful night’”
given
that he was the first to recognize. It
is the event in Western culture, of long
duration,
wherein the truth of being as a whole transformed, the end of which, the
nihilism, only reflects the truth that this historical change has provided.
Hence his infamous statement, “God is Dead.”
Nietzsche did not kill God, rather he observed European society and
thought, and perceived that culture had killed God along while back.
Although Nietzsche’s
nihilism is the documentation of a historical trend, we still have not
established what in fact differentiates it from Schopenhauer’s?
The essential difference is that Nietzsche’s nihilism does not leave
one with a vast nothingness to which we must surrender. Rather it engenders
freedom, a positive opportunity. “The
fact that earlier aims now disappear and former values are devalued is no longer
experienced as sheer annihilation and deplored as wasteful and wrong, but is
rather greeted as a liberation, touted as an irrevocable gain and perceived as fulfillment”
(Heidegger 850). In turn, nihilism takes on more than the destruction of all
previous values; it calls for a new valuation – a revaluation. Revaluation points to the disappearance of the very place
for values [the transcendent], not merely the disappearance of such former
values.
Here, before we begin to examine The
Twilight of the Idols for a better understanding of Nietzsche’s views of
decadence, in order to dispel any ill-founded biases, let us first indulge in
summarizing some of Nietzsche’s most notorious concepts which resulted from
his notions of revaluation. Since value can no longer be drawn from above, value
must therefore be drawn from beings. And
the basic character of beings as a whole is power.
It alone determines all things and does not recognize value outside of
itself. More specifically, the
basic character of beings is will to power, “Every being, insofar as it is,
and is as it is, is ‘will to power’” (Heidegger 852).
Will to power is
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“Today
the man of knowledge might well feel like God became animal”
unique
in that in order for power to maintain itself, it must be ever increasing in
power;
it must be ever becoming.
“That which is opposed to becoming, the same or the identical, strictly
speaking, is not” (Delueze 858). The
new valuation of power, the essence of becoming, that which is being,
necessarily tolerates no end outside of whole being.
Here
the question arises of what is whole being – for we certainly know that
Nietzsche did not conceive of us as the embodiment of whole being. Whole being then is something that we have not yet reached,
but something that we are free to pursue as a result of the destruction of
transcendent values. What then are we actively pursuing through our endless
becoming, what then are we reaching towards in our efforts to realize a fuller
potential? The Overman.
The Overman (Ubermench) over takes man as we know him, meaning that it
leaves the man of traditional values, of traditional weakness, behind.
He is as superior to men today as men are to apes. The Overman posits all
values to the empowerment of power – it is justified to the extent that it
serves to nurture and enhance the will to power.
From
Nietzsche’s point of view, the Overman is not meant to be a mere amplification
of prior man, but the most unequivocally singular form of human existence that,
as absolute will to power, is brought to power in every man . . . and thereby
grants him membership to being as a whole (Heidegger 854).
Nietzsche
gave no physical description of the Overman, the blond beast. And indeed there
exists a pathetic irony when one considers the dissonance between the reality of
the frail and sickly philosopher, and his conceptions of strength and power as
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“Whoever
fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a
monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks at you”
embodied in his vision of the Overman.
However, the rift between the two is not as significant as the challenge
that it presented Nietzsche to pursue his voyage. Nietzsche was well aware of
his visionary gifts, as was he aware of his inability of fulfilling them
himself. “I have been blessed by Providence with an outstanding comprehension
of the truth such as rarely been granted to any man . . . in this matter I have
reason for humility in only one respect: it is that I have not had the strength
to be myself what I understood” (Masur 84).
For us, the fact that Nietzsche did not become his own ideal is
relatively inconsequential. For
him, it meant that the he continued to suffer, and as a result he continued to
push further and further into the unknown.
Throughout
most of his life, Nietzsche was plagued by intense physical sufferings.
Subject to constant digestive problems, migraine headaches that would
last for days, partial blindness and vomiting blood, he experienced sickness on
an intensely personal level, and he thus understood the perspective value of
health that sickness provides. Philosophically,
this is equally as true for Nietzsche. Just
as he denounced decadence, he also acknowledged his indebtedness to it, and to
Wagner as well. Without decadence one would not understand the opportunity for
self-consciousness that health avails.
Born
in 1844 in a small Prussian town, Nietzsche was the son of a Protestant Pastor,
who died when Nietzsche was still just a boy.
He attended academically distinguished schools throughout and, at the
University of Basel at age twenty-four, his impressive studies earned him a
doctorate without an examination. He
stayed at the University of Basel but taught only briefly, retiring on a meager pension when he was forced to leave due
to the illnesses which so impacted his life.
Until
Nietzsche went to college where he was exposed to demysticizing theories of
Christianity, he held strong religious convictions, Christian at that, which he
had since he was a child [when his peers referred to him as The Pastor]. When in
1865
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“Whatever
is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil”
Nietzsche came home for Easter from
the University of Bonn, he made his mother cry when he refused communion. This
refusal, however, did not mark an annihilating break from spirituality as much
as a transformation into a new set of beliefs.
What
were some of the reasons that Nietzsche turned against Christianity, just as he
turned against his two other noteworthy influences, Schopenhauer and Wagner?
Christian morality as Nietzsche interpreted it, with its emphasis on
humility and servitude, forces us to fight against our instincts, against life as
life. Such a force leads only to
decline and eventually decay; Nietzsche declared such a movement away from life
to be the exact formula of decadence. He
never succeeded in escaping decadence, in fact, as noted in “Five Faces of
Modernity,” decadence is the central theme of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
‘Nothing
has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence – I had
reasons. “Good and evil” is
merely a variation of that problem. Once
one has developed a keen eye for the symptoms of decline, one understands
morality, too – one understands what is hiding under its most sacred names and
value formulas: impoverished life, the will to the end, the great weariness.
Morality negates life’. (Calinescu
179).
Morality, the instinct of decadence,
says “’Perish!’ It is a condemnation pronounced by the condemned” (Twilight
490). More specifically, the key distinction of decadence is that the
condemned choose to perish. No one condemns the condemned but themselves, and
in choosing condemnation, in choosing morality, they overtly renounce the will
to live. Of utmost importance is
that this self-chosen decrease in vitality is not the cause of decadence, but
its effect.
This is the most harmful and dangerous mystification of decadence, the
mistake
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Jesus said to his Jews: ’The
law was for servants – love God as I love him, as his son.
What are morals to us sons of God?’”
of confusing effect for the cause, as
in the case of religion. Every religion, every morality, claims Nietzsche, is
founded on a system of do’s and don’ts that claim happiness as their effect.
‘In my mouth,’ retorts Nietzsche ‘
this
formula is changed into its opposite – first example of my ‘revaluation of
all values’: a well-turned-out human being, a ‘happy one,’ must
perform certain actions and shrinks instinctively form other actions . . .
In a formula, his virtue is the effect
of his happiness (Twilight 493).
Following, for example, is that we
are not destroyed by luxury, as the church claims, but that we are prey to
luxury precisely because we are already degenerate, already decadent, and thus
starving for stronger and more frequent stimulation.
Decadence imitates truth - that is its danger. It presents its effects as its cause, it presents weakness as
strength, as easily recognizable in Christianity. “Decadence is dangerous,”
says Calinescu “because it always disguises itself as its opposite” (Calinescu
180).
Another symptom of decadence, in which Nietzsche himself fully
participates, is the dialectic. It thus follows that he declared that he
possessed “ ‘a subtler sense of smell for the signs of ascent and decline
than any other human being before me; I am the teacher par
excellence for this – I know both, I am both’” (Calinescu 180).
How can Nietzsche simultaneously shout the dangers of decadence, and
himself dwell in decadence - for in fact he notes the indebtedness that he feels
to his “dialectician’s clarity” ? The important thing to remember about
Nietzsche’s approach to decadence is that neither truth nor error, fiction or
lie has any value in and of itself. Whether
or not they promote or hinder life is the only thing that attributes value to
such positions. This may help to
explain the many contradictions that are inherent in Nietzsche’s texts.
Some of them appear as generalities that are meant to jar us out of our
complicity.
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“What a time experiences as
evil is usually an untimely echo of what was formally experienced as good –
the atavism of a more ancient ideal”
Others exists because, Nietzsche
asks, what import does a ‘truth’ or ‘lie’ actually have?
And still, contradictions appear because for one reevaluating a system
from within a system, they are inevitable.
Nietzsche himself was subject to the decadence of modernity, prisoner to
a time in which he clearly did not belong.
Hence we understand that, “One chooses dialectic only when one has no
other means. One knows that one
arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. . . It can only be self-defense
for those who no longer have other weapons” (Twilight
476). It is Nietzsche’s
grandiose project, the transvaluation of all values,
that accounts for the “feverishly dialectical quality of his thought”
(Calinescu 180).
It
is therefore seen as a matter of perspective; in fact Nietzsche referred to his
philosophy as “perspectivism.” Thus,
decadence is not something to be fought, in so far as decadence, decline, is a
natural part of life. However, one
must secure the healthy parts of the organism from the sickness which is
decadence – here we are not speaking physiologically (where decay is as
natural growth), but psychologically. One
can be weak without being decadent, to be decadent one must will weakness. “Decadence,
then, appears as a form of psychological, moral or aesthetic self-deception, as
a result of which weakness becomes a task,
as Nietzsche puts it” (Calinescu 183). The
whole of the difference lies between the one who can realize that truth is a
fiction (a creation of life which helps achieve its purpose, its power), and the
decadent who paints fiction as truth. “When we treat illusion as a reality, when we endow it with
the “moral” prestige of truth, we blind ourselves to its nature and became
the slaves of a lifeless dogma” (Calinescuv186).
By
1878, Nietzsche became certain that Richard Wagner refused to recognize a
difference between the truth as a fiction and the decadent who declares fiction
as truth. Nietzsche no longer saw truth of any kind in Wagner’s music, as he
once had, but only
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“In
the end one loves one’s desire and not what is desired”
a shallow, if cleverly veiled
illusion that Wagner, and his mass of followers alike, mistook for truth.
By the time Nietzsche encountered Wagner’s music for the first time, a
full ten years before he turned on him, Nietzsche was already immersed in
Schopenhauer and his powerful notions of music. Again, Schopenhauer understood
music not as a reflection of life, but as life itself, as pure will. In “Die
Meistersinger” and “Tristan und Isolde” Nietzsche likewise felt that he
was directly encountering reality itself.
The
young Nietzsche went out of his way to become introduced to Wagner and in no
time, the two became intimate friends. A
frequent guest of the Wagners at their villa in Switzerland, “the older man seemed to offer everything that had been
missing from [Nietzsche’s] life: a father, a god, and eventually a place to
worship – the new theatre being planned for Bayreuth” (Pierpont 84). It was
during the period when Nietzsche frequented the villa in Switzerland that he
wrote and completed his first book The
Birth of Tragedy (1872). In the work, he offers a return to Greek Tragedy as
an insight into his redefinition of the creative impulse of art, specifically
music. In music, Nietzsche saw the
power of life flowing through the individual with the simultaneous power to
unite the finite self in the face of our tragedy. “His description, part sensual rapture and part spiritual
consolation, was exactly parallel to his description of Wagner,” which he
passionately addresses in the final sections of the book (Pierpont 85).
In
light of the power and subsequent expectations that Nietzsche entrusted to
Wagner’s music, a disappointment seems almost inevitable, especially from
under the scrutinizing eyes of a critic such as Nietzsche.
Wagner’s notorious pettiness, pretension and anti-Semitism made it all
the more foreseeable. However, Nietzsche’s attack on Wagner far surpasses any
personal disappointment or incompatibility.
In Wagner, Nietzsche saw the embodiment of the decadence of that
epitomized modernity.
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“Not that you lied to me, but that I no longer believe
you, has shaken me”
The decline of modernity was directly
influenced by the decadence of the romantics, as Nietzsche was one of the first
to point out. Romantic decadence,
as refuted by Goethe (here we recall his famous dictum “Classic is healthy,
romantic is sick”), helped Nietzsche to attribute the illness of romanticism.
Not only did Goethe label the romantic age as sick, but he also
represented, for Nietzsche, the strong and healthy, everything that is not
decadent. What Nietzsche saw in Goethe, he came to decide, was what he found to
be lacking in his youthful idols, Schopenhauer and Wagner, and in fact Goethe,
as a historical personality, is the closest approximation of the Overman that
Nietzsche left us. Nietzsche saw
both Goethe as person and the nineteenth century as striving for:
“universality in understanding and in welcoming, letting everything come close
to oneself, an audacious realism, a reverence for everything factual.
How is it that the result is no Goethe, but a nihilistic sigh, an utter
bewilderment, an instinct of weariness. . .?” (Twilight 555).
What
is it about decadence, its nihilism
and instinctive weariness, that is distinct to modernity, for Nietzsche saw
modernity as the highest point of decadence?
The morality of the most decadent religion, Christianity, is not peculiar
to the nineteenth century. In fact,
it was within the previous century, the age of reason, that the frayed edges of
Christianity formally began to unwind. However, Nietzsche astutely noted that
the nineteenth century inherited not so much a set of Christian symbols, but a ressentiment,
an hostility to life (Calinescu 192). This
hostility to life, then, was not confined to Christian symbols, but became
infused with all that was modern. Through this infusion, this ressentiment was able to appear as its very opposite; in Wagner’s
latter music, Nietzsche claims to have recognized this hostility that mimicked
truth.
Indeed
Nietzsche was one of the first thinkers to have unveiled modernity’s
dependence on Christianity. Despite
modernity’s (as well as the preceding decades)
“Objections,
digressions, gay mistrust, the delight in mockery are signs of health:
everything unconditional belongs to pathology”
crusade against Christianity, the
notions “progress” which so color modernity, still
revert back to the Christian
conception of time, wherein the real is always in an utopian future.
Gasset characterizes “the modern ‘doctrine of culture’ [as] nothing
but ‘a Christianity without God’” (Calinescu 193).
Thus modernity is still searching for something beyond; modernity is
decadent as it ascribes to life meanings other than those of life itself.
As
already established, the advent of modernity did not murder God, rather the age
of reason, a reason which Socrates was the first to betray through a veil of
truth, had already killed him. In Twilight
of the Idols, Nietzsche concisely documents the stages in which the ‘true
world’ became obscured, the true world being that in which our life giving
instincts reign freely and joyously in the face of tragedy.
In fact, Twilight of the Idols
is the work in which he explicitly aims at demythologizing our weak and yet
trusted idols. In so doing,
Nietzsche essentially announces the dawn of a new set of values, values that
accurately reflect life. What follows is “the History of an Error,” directly
quoted in full, where Nietzsche traces the development of our illusions, and
eventually our refusal of them. The paper then explores some of Nietzsche’s
views of decadence as they relate to
prominent fin-de-siècle themes, such as l’art
pour l'art, spirituality and Darwinism, all as seen within Twilight
of the Idols.
How
the “True World” Finally Became a Fable
The
History of an Error
1.
The true World – attainable for the sage, the pious the virtuous man;
he lives in it, he
is it. (The oldest form of the idea, relatively senile, simple, and
persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, “I, Plato, am
the truth).”
2.
The true world – unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the
pious,
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“Many a peacock hides his peacock tail from all eyes – and that he
calls pride”
the virtuous man (“for the sinner
who repents”). (Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious,
incomprehensible – it becomes female,
it becomes Christian.
3. The true world –
unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it, a
consolation, an obligation, an imperative.
(At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Kantian.)
4. The true world – unattainable?
At any rate, unattained. And
being unattained, also unknown.
Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could
something unknown obligate us? (Gray morning. The
first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)
5. The “true’’ world - an idea which is no longer food for
anything, not even obligating – an idea which has become superfluous – consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright day;
breakfast, return of bon sens and
cheerfulness; Plato’s embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)
6. The true world – we have abolished.
What world has remained? The
apparent one perhaps? But no! With the
true world we have also abolished the apparent one. (Noon; moment of
briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT
ZARATHRUSTRA [Zarathustra begins].) (Twilight
485,6).
L’art
pour l’art:
Or
in Nietzsche’s words: “The devil take morality!”
Nietzsche saw the acclaimed art for
art’s sake movement of the turn of the century as an essentially empty phrase.
The fight against purpose in art, to Nietzsche, was essentially a
rebellion against the moralizing tendency in art; thence his exclamation::
“the devil take morality!” But is it acceptable to deny art purpose namely
because of the fear of morality? Nietzsche saw this denial as a mere passionate and
ineffective cry. What does art do
for us, Nietzsche (as the psychologist) asks?
“does it not praise?
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“It was subtle of God to learn
Greek when he wished to become an author – and not to learn it better”
glorify?
choose? prefer? With all of this it strengthens or weakens certain
validations” (Twilight 529).
Each of these questions posed by art are not incidental side effects,
argues Nietzsche. They point to a tendency in the artist whose basic instinct
aims not merely at art, but at the sense of art – the sense of a life.
“Art is the great stimulus of life: how could one understand it as
purposeless, as aimless, as l’art pour
l’art?” (Twilight 529).
However, what happens when the basic
instinct of the artist aims at an ‘ugly’ side of life -does it thereby mean
that art spoils life for us? In essence, this is what Schopenhauer describes
when he says that art offers “liberation from the will,” for will is of
course life. However, Nietzsche
suggests that we appeal to the artists themselves, asking what does the tragic
artist show us? Is not the tragic
artist communicating without fear in
the face of all that is ugly and questionable in life? The tragic artist
therefore affirms life in the face of its tragedy.
“Courage and freedom of feeling before a powerful enemy, before a
sublime calamity, before a problem that arouses dread – this triumphant state
is what the tragic artist chooses, what he glorifies” (Twilight 530). Since
for Nietzsche art is the great stimulus for life, even tragic art, we can not
understand it, we must not understand it as purposeless, unless we too will
decline.
Spirituality
Thus art’s purpose is to stimulate
life; however, we must be careful not to conceive of life as similarly having a
purpose, a teleos. Life’s only goal is to power, to continue becoming – to
live. To trace being back to will or to acts of responsibility is to deprive
becoming of its innocence, says Nietzsche. Similarly, “It is absurd to wish to
devolve one’s essence on an end. We have invented the concept of an end.
In reality, there is no
end” (Twilight
499). Up until this point, we’ve done away with God, morality,
transcendence and now purpose. Finally the question arises, what, if any, is
Nietzsche’s
*
*
*
“The sense of the tragic
gains and wanes with sensuality”
concept of spirituality?
Is spirituality possible without the fore mentioned?
Yes, Nietzsche not only affirms
spirituality, but he actually tells us what we must do to learn how to be
spiritual. The three lessons which Nietzsche commissions us to learn are how to see,
speak and write.
The first preliminary schooling for
spirituality is learning how to see, that is how to accustom the eye to calmness
and acceptance. One must learn not
to react, not to will, “to be able
to suspend decision. All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the
inability to resist a stimulus: one must react
. . .” (Twilight 511).
We also need to learn to think, an essential craft that Nietzsche did not
see as being taught in even the universities.
He believed that we must learn to think like we learn to dance, through a
technique; but we also need to understand thinking as a kind of dancing.
To be spiritual, one must be able to dance with one’s feet and concepts
alike. One must also be able to dance with the pen. Heidegger was later to pick
up on this idea of linking thought, as a craft, to the written word and thus to
the hand.
Interestingly, even with the
necessary destruction of morality, the passions can play a spiritual role in
life. Passions themselves are not bad – in fact, nothing is bad in itself.
Any destructive tendencies of passion are merely the effect
of decadence, yet the important thing is that one does not willing fall prey to
the destructive spell of passion. “All
passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, when they drag down their
victim with the weight of stupidity – and a later, very much later phase when
they wed the spirit, when they ‘spiritualize’ themselves” (Twilight 486). Spirituality, in fact, plays a substantial role in
Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole, as one of the essential components of the
Overman, spirituality as such must be one of our goals.
Darwin
On first consideration, one might
assume that Nietzsche is unequivocally pro-Darwin.
*
*
*
“Whoever is a teacher through
and through takes all things seriously only in relation to his students – even
himself”
However,
given a closer glance, Nietzsche actually views ‘evolution’ quite
differently from
Darwin.
Instead of a struggle for existence, Nietzsche sees an existence that is
characterized by richness, abundance, even absurd squandering.
There is of course a struggle for existence, says Nietzsche, but this is
the exception, not the norm. Any struggle is for power, for power is
continuously struggling to overcome itself, in order to keep becoming, in order
to exist as such. However, when there is such an exceptional
struggle for existence, Nietzsche, interestingly, sees it as the opposite
as the Darwinian school which favors the strong and fortunate, the fittest of
the fit. Rather, Nietzsche saw the
weak (the vast majority) as victorious, again and again, over and against the
strong.
Darwin
forgot the spirit (that is English!); the
weak have more spirit. One must
need spirit to acquire spirit; one looses it when one no longer needs it.
Whoever has strength dispenses with spirit . . . it will be noted that by
‘spirit’ I mean care, patience, cunning, simulation, great self-control, and
everything that is mimicry (the latter includes a great deal of so-called
virtue). (Twilight 523).
This illustrates Nietzsche’s praise
of the Jewish, who assimilated ‘virtues’ such as the ones above and who, in
so doing, survived as a race and people through a reversal of values wherein
humility, patience, servitude became admirable for their adversaries, the
Christians. Here it should
be noted that Nietzsche was not, despite his post-humus association with Nazism,
anti-Semitic. He became furious when the anti-Semitic press took him for a
supporter of prejudice against “ ‘the strongest, toughest, and purest race
now living in Europe.’” In Beyond Good
and Evil he wrote that, instead of expelling the Jews from Germany “ ‘it
might be useful and fair to expel the anti-Semitic screamers from the
country’” (Pierpont 88).
*
*
*
“An incarnation of dissonance
– and what else is man?”
How then did Nietzsche’s philosophy
became the stage for Hitler’s intense anti-Semitism?
After Nietzsche’s mother took control of him when he was declared
insane in 1895, all of his estate – papers, books and unpublished writings –
fell into the hands of his sister (that “ ‘vindictive anti-Semitic
goose’”). She held back certain
works, re-edited others, and published an array of scattered notes under the
title The Will to Power which was
taken up as Nazi source book of sorts. Indeed,
it was Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth who is to blame for the massive
misinterpretation of Nietzsche’s work by the Nazis who claimed his support;
incidentally, “she would have been proud to bear [the weight of the blame]”
(Pierpont 88).
Indeed his sister Elizabeth bears immense responsibility for many of the
ill- founded readings of Nietzsche’s text.
However, Nietzsche himself consciously wrote in such a way as to
challenge the reader. His strong
inclinations toward psychology pushed him to always push his readers – only
when one needs to be strong will one become stronger.
His witty word play, as well as his memorable aphorisms, examples of
which appear at the bottom of each page, make quoting him out of context
tempting. Of course, his many
contradictions also lend themselves to easily misconstrued interpretations.
Any view of Nietzsche as a ruthless, heartless man who dismissed the good
of people in the name of strength is also terribly misconstrued.
Strength is the thing that gives value to goodness, for then the goodness
is freely chosen. As a man, Nietzsche felt that pity was always a major problem
throughout his life. Hence we see
why he made such an attack against it in his philosophy; he must have felt that
it was holding back something vital in himself.
Similarly, Nietzsche “laments ‘a soft spot that would have made any
magnanimous Greek burst into laughter.’ In
fact, Nietzsche confessed to feeling a terror at the idea of compassion – a
terror of being swamped by the suffering of the world” (Pierpont 89).
In 1889, Nietzsche collapsed with his arms wrapped around the neck of a
horse whom he was frantically trying to save from execution. He withheld ten
years until his eventual death in 1900.