FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
AN ESSAY IN COMPREHENSION
To I. C. R.
Philosophy in the hands of philosophers tends always to hide the tremors of its exciting conception in the dried abstract statements of dialectic. A philosopher’s pride is in the impersonal nature of his thought. It must stand by itself, and work like a piece of machinery, on which the maker’s name is the only sign that it was once a daring, personal adventure of the intellect, the instincts and the senses of the body of a man. Its maker, when it is finished, would wish to wipe the filings and the oil from his hands with a piece of cotton waste, and, folding his arms, to watch it in independent activity. The reason of this ambition is to be found neither in modesty, nor yet in vanity, but in a ruling intellectual concept, the concept of absolute truth. If the true is universally true, if a thing either is, or is not, then the personality of the thinker either is grit in the wheels, or, by the necessity of its presence and assistance, betrays the weakness of the thought whose truth or untruth can in no way be affected by the existence or non-existence of its discoverer. This Nietzsche resolutely denied, and denied in two ways.
First, he denied the absolute nature of truth, asserting that the word “true” was merely a title given by men to opinions, and that the justice of its application was, in a broad sense, to be judged pragmatically. A pragmatist before William James, he said: “The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing; and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong) are the most indispensable to us; that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life.”[5]
Secondly, he denied that the personality of the thinker was a disturbing factor in his thought. It was, on the contrary, the guarantee that once at least that thought had been true. “Now philosophical systems are absolutely true only to their founders; to all later philosophers they are usually a single big mistake, and to feebler minds a sum of mistakes and truths.... Therefore many disapprove of every philosopher, because his aim is not theirs.... Whoever, on the contrary, finds any pleasure at all in great men finds pleasure also in all such systems, be they ever so erroneous, for they all have in them one point which is irrefutable, a personal touch and colour; one can use them in order to form a picture of the philosopher, just as from a plant growing in a certain place one can form conclusions as to the soil. That mode of life, of viewing human affairs at any rate, has existed once, and is therefore possible.” He wrote that quite early in his career in his little book on early Greek philosophy, a history like the dawn setting on fire the tips of the distant mountains, then the nearer, and at last throwing on the ground behind him the shadow of the observer. For Nietzsche, the mountain peaks are those fragments of the crumbled systems which are personal to their authors, and, even if refutable as philosophy are irrefutable as particular and individual revelations. It is a delightful little gathering of philosophers and, perhaps, more important than has yet been admitted, in its promise of Nietzsche’s habit of thought, his impatience of dialectic, his dislike of the Parmenidean mind, his trust in the poetic, the particular. “What verse is to the poet,” he says, “dialectic thinking is to the philosopher; he snatches at it in order to hold fast his enchantment, in order to petrify it.” From this view he never departed. In Beyond Good and Evil he repeats his belief in the personal character of thought: “In each cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable ‘I am this’; a thinker cannot learn anew about man and woman, for instance, but can only learn fully—he can only follow to the end what is ‘fixed’ about them in himself.” And again in Zarathustra: “‘This is now my way—where is yours?’ Thus did I answer those who asked me ‘the way.’ For the way—it doth not exist.”
And so, for Nietzsche, truth is infinitely variable, minted afresh by each man and dependent upon his image and superscription for a guarantee of its particular validity. It was for this reason that he despised the elaborate stage-play of reasoning. He believed that to exhibit ideas in a white light and at a mean temperature, when they offered themselves in the glow of the morning or in the heat of noon, was to strip them of their credentials. He insisted that his own thoughts were true in relation to himself, and preserved their concreteness by way of preserving the conditions of their truth. He refused the step from the concrete to the abstract as a step into annihilation, and in this way identified himself with the poets. To misunderstand him here is to misread him everywhere.
We are examining, then, in Friedrich Nietzsche a man whose view of truth demanded the personal presence of the thinker as guarantee of the thought. Consequently, though for reasons I have already given it is usual on the part of philosophers and their critics to rule the personality of a thinker out of a discussion of his thought, here, at least, we are justified in glancing at a man’s character before we examine the ideas that will help us to fill it out to approximate verisimilitude.
Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, went mad in January 1889, and died on August 25, 1900. His father was a country parson, simple, upright, patriotic and monarchical. He found joy in the coincidence of his son’s birthday with that of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and this circumstance gave Nietzsche his names. His mother was a young woman of high spirits and great physical energy, so exuberant and so lovable as to be described as “a gorgeous savage” by her mother-in-law. His father, “preordained to pay only a flying visit—a gracious reminder of life rather than life itself,” died in his six and thirtieth year, before Nietzsche was five. A grandmother, two aunts and his mother presided over a pious happy childhood, from which he emerged as a model schoolboy, laughably virtuous, walking slowly home in a rainstorm in spite of his mother’s frenzied urging, and rebuking this urging with pained austerity: “But, mamma, in the rules of the school it is written, ‘On leaving school boys are forbidden to jump and run about in the streets, but must walk quietly and decorously to their homes.’” This sedateness persisted with him, although he could so completely forget himself in playing with children, that when he was twenty-six and a professor, he was laughed at and told he was only fourteen. He always dressed with notable nicety. Though he said, with pride, that he would rather be a satyr than a saint, he had a dignity that belongs rather to holiness than to lust. Children and old women loved him. The fruit-sellers in the Turin market-place hurried to pick out for him their finest grapes. He had gentle manners, a beautiful voice, and a profound sense of the politeness that an aristocrat owes to himself. He clung to the legend that he was the descendant of Polish noblemen, and was proud of being mistaken by Poles for a Pole, that Frenchman among the Slavs. His favourite books were the courteous unruffled French moralists of the seventeenth century, and the works of Stendhal, who resembled them in wearing a sword and in his love of fine manners.
His precarious health gave him extreme sensitiveness to his physical condition. He believed that clear thinking was only possible in dry air and on hills. His highest praise for his work was that it was mountain thought. He composed in the open air and in motion, and advised other people to follow his example. “Remain seated as little as possible, put no trust in any thought that is not born in the open, to the accompaniment of free bodily motion—nor in one in which even the muscles do not celebrate a feast. All prejudices take their origin in the intestines.”
He seized on Flaubert’s “On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis,” with a cry: “Here have I got you, you nihilist? A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.”
He defended himself against the charge of decadence, claiming that “apart from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the reverse of such a creature.” A decadent, he said, was one attracted by what was detrimental to him, “as the cabbage attracts the vegetarian.” A healthy man, on the other hand, enjoys what is good for him, possesses “the will to health,” and “is strong enough to make everything turn to his own advantage.” He found in convalescence “a pale delicate light and a sunshine happiness,” “a feeling of bird-like freedom, prospect, and haughtiness.” From the combination of his ill-health and his healthiness (he was in youth at least physically robust), Nietzsche learnt, he says, “to look upon healthier concepts and values from the standpoint of the sick, and conversely to look down upon the secret work of the instincts of decadence from the standpoint of him who is laden and rich with the richness of life.” He mentions “the sweetness and spirituality which is almost inseparable from extreme poverty of blood and muscle,” and remembers the unusual dialectical clearness he enjoyed while suffering from headache and nausea. He was more conscious than most men that his body shared in the adventures of his brain. When the idea of Eternal Recurrence came into his mind by the lake of Silvaplana, high in the mountains, it was perhaps with some recognition of this that, after scribbling it down on a sheet of paper, he added the exultant postscript: “6000 feet beyond man and time!”