by Colin Wilson
But in 1868 the two were on the best of terms; their capacity for enthusiasm obscured their basic unlikeness. Nietzsche added a chapter to his Birth of Tragedy to hail Wagner as the new artistic Messiah, and Wagner returned the compliment by declaring the book one of the finest he had ever read.
Nietzsche’s academic colleagues were less complimentary; they expected Nietzsche to write like a professor, and when he wrote like a prophet they all rounded on him and called him a conceited upstart. Nietzsche was unlucky; it would have taken him another ten years establishing himself as a professor before such weighty ex cathedra pronouncements could be taken seriously. As a young man of genius, he could hardly be expected to realize this. But it is a pity he didn’t, for the failure to size up the situation would eventually cost him his sanity. The life-long persecution had begun. He would be driven further into his manner of dogmatic self-assertion by the opposition of diehards who considered him half-insane, until the chapters of his last book would be headed: ‘Why am I so Wise?’, ‘Why am I so Clever?’, ‘Why I Write such Excellent Books’.
The remainder of Nietzsche’s life can be divided into three periods. The Birth of Tragedy exalted life above thought: ‘Down with thought—long live life!’ The books of the next ten years reversed the ideal: ‘Down with life—long live thought!’ Socrates is reinstated; truth becomes the only important aim. Then, at the time when ill-health forced him to retire from University duties, another change began with The Joyful Wisdom and Thus Spake Zarathustra, and again ‘energy is eternal delight’. And so it was to the end.
The end came in 1899 (the same Year as Van Gogh’s collapse). He began writing strange letters, signing them ‘Caesar’ and ‘The King of Naples’ and, more significantly, ‘the crucified one’. His last letter to Cosima Wagner read: ‘Ariadne, I love thee. Dionysus.’ It was complete mental collapse. Nietzsche was insane until his death, ten years later.
It is almost impossible to do justice to the range of Nietzsche’s thought in a study of this length. He wrote no single major work that could be called ‘the essence of Nietzsche’. There is a pugilistic air about his books that he himself recognized when he subtitled one of them: ‘How to Philosophize with a Hammer/ They are not component parts of a system; they are rather parts of a continual self-revelation of Nietzsche the man. Fully to understand Nietzsche, it would be necessary for the reader to be acquainted with at least half a dozen of them besides Zarathustra, with, say, The Birth of Tragedy, Human All Too Human, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, Ecce Homo (the autobiography) The Will to Power (a rather doubtful collection of notes arranged after Nietzsche’s death by his sister—Nietzsche’s ‘Pense’es’). In this chapter I shall not attempt a summary of these books; that would be difficult enough even with unlimited space, and besides, it is not necessary for our purposes. The questions that concern us now are: How far did Nietzsche express his problems as an Outsider, and how far did he solve them? The first question can be answered immediately: he expressed the Outsider problems more fully than anyone we have yet considered. The second will require an examination of his life.
Critics and doctors have been divided on the cause of his insanity. Modern research supports the view that his collapse was brought on by venereal disease contracted in his student days from a prostitute. (A fictionalized version of this story is given in Thomas Mann’s novel based on Nietzsche’s life, Doktor Faustus.) Such a physical cause would be as relevant to the collapse as the inherited nervous tension of Nijinsky or the irritability of Van Gogh. But the deeper cause is to be sought in the problems he faced.
He was always alone. He never married, never had a mistress, never (as far as we know) even had sexual relations with any woman except a prostitute. Few people liked and supported him; his admirers during his life can be counted on the fingers of one hand; and even they sometimes turned against him. Above all, there was ill-health (a legacy from his Army period); his sedentary way of life encouraged headaches, indigestion, mental and physical exhaustion; he was so myopic as to be almost blind at times. These things acted as brakes on his creativity. The intellect climbed to great heights in his periods of good health and well-being; but, just as with Van Gogh, the pettinesses were waiting to irritate and exhaust him when he came down. His self-esteem received some hard kicks. When he sent a friend to propose to a young lady for him, she rejected him and married the friend. (The young lady was Lou Salome, who was later to become the close friend of that other great Nietzschean poet, Rainer Rilke.) His sanest and best-argued books provoked Germany’s guardians of culture to accuse him of extravagant self-worship or insanity. Thoughts that seemed to him gigantic, world-shaking, were received without interest. The continued optimism of his letters is an amazing feat:
Well my dear friend, the sun of August shines on us, the year slips on, calm and peace spread over the mountains and forests. I have seen thoughts rising on my horizon the like of which I have never seen before. ... I must live a few years longer. I feel a presentiment that the life I lead is a life of supreme peril. / am one of those machines that sometimes explode. The intensity of my emotion makes me tremble and burst out laughing. Several times I have been unable to leave my room for the ridiculous reason that my eyes were swollen —and why? Each time I have wept too much on my walks the day before—not sentimental tears, but actual tears of joy. I sang and cried out foolish things. I was full of a new vision in which I forestalled all other men.17 [Italics mine.]
The sentence I have italicized recalls Van Gogh’s: ‘Well, as to my work, I have risked my life for it, and my reason has half foundered.9 But the last part brings to mind another deeply religious man; ‘tears of joy’, ‘pleurs de joie’: it is the phrase that Pascal used in that strange testament, found sewn into the lining of his coat after his death, to describe the vision that came to him after long illness and suffering:
feu
Dieu d’Abraham, dim de Jacob, dieu d’Isaac
Non des philosophes et savants....
Pure will, free of the perplexities of intellect....
For Nietzsche also it came after long suffering; he writes of The Joyful Wisdom:
It seems to be written in the language of a thawing wind.... Gratitude continually flows, as if the most unexpected thing had happened—the gratitude of a convalescent—for convalescence was that most unexpected thing. The whole book is nothing but a long revel after long privation and impotence, the frolicking of returning energy, of newly awakened belief in a tomorrow after tomorrow....18
The ‘long privation and impotence’ had been the period that had produced the Socratic books, Thoughts Out of Season, The Dawn of Day, Human All Too Human. Now he declares new scepticism, and it is the scepticism of an intellectual who discovers that he has neglected the body and the emotions:
The unconscious disguising of physiological requirements under the cloaking of the objective, the ideal, the purely spiritual.... I have asked myself whether philosophy hitherto has not been merely an interpreting of the body and a misunderstanding of the body.19
He speaks of that questioning of everything (of which I quoted Jouffroy’s example):
...one emerges from such dangerous exercises in self-mastery as another being... with a will to question more than ever.... Confidence in life has gone; life itself has become a problem. One doesn’t necessarily become a hypochondriac because of this. Even love is still possible— only one loves differently. It is the love of a woman of whom one is doubtful.20
This is Nietzsche’s version of the twice-born state. And he goes on to express his disillusion with the Socratic spirit:
... as artists, we are learning to forget and not know.... We are not likely to be found again in the tracks of those Egyptian youths who at night make the temples unsafe, embrace statues,* and would fain unveil, uncover and put in clear light, everything which for good reasons is kept concealed. No, we have got disgusted with this bad-taste, this will-to-truth, to ‘truth at all costs’, this youthful mad
ness in the love of truth; we are now too experienced for that; we no longer believe that truth remains truth if the evil is withdrawn from it.21
And in the first Aphorism of Book IV, ‘Sanctus Januarius’, Nietzsche summarizes:
I still live, I still think; I must still live, for I must still think. / wish to be at all times hereafter only a Yea-sayer.
Henceforward, this is to be the keynote of Nietzsche’s philosophy; he questions unceasingly; he dismisses all previous Western philosophers as fools and blockheads whose ‘systems* reveal at every turn their puny, human-all-too-human limitations. Kant, with his ersatz morality, is a special target, Hegel another. These men exalted thought as if it could be separated from life and instated in a superior order. Consequently, they de-valued life, failed to recognize that thought is only an instrument to ‘more abundant life’. Man’s way is the way of affirmation, Yea-saying, praise. These mere thinkers were poisoners, cheapeners of life (‘professors of what another man has suffered5, Kierkegaard called them). The greatest act man is capable of is to ‘praise in spite of, to become aware of the worst forms of the Eternal No and to make the gigantic effort of digesting them and still finding life positive.
Little by little, Nietzsche was learning to say Yes. This was the problem that occupied him on his long walks: Ultimate Yes or Ultimate No? He had left Basle a very sick man, sick of life, sick of fools, sick of opposition and re-gathering his strength only to waste it again; and sick of Friedrich Nietzsche and his dreams that were out of gear with the universe. He was getting tired of the everlasting pendulum that swung between Yes and No, of happiness that made him think misery unimportant, and misery that made happiness seem a delusion. He wanted to know for certain. He looked into himself and faced the fact that he could not say Yes or No. He asked himself: Is this true of the nature of life itself, or could a man exist who could say finally: I accept everything? His imagination set to work on the problem, to conceive a man great enough to affirm. Not the Hero—no hero could ever command a philosopher’s complete admiration. But the prophet, the saint, the man of genius, the man. of action; or, perhaps, a combination of all four?
And two great concepts were born together: the Superman and Eternal Recurrence. Yea-saying depends on the will to live. But the will to live depends upon nothing except the man himself; it can be deepened, broadened by meditation, by constant mental struggle, by an act of faith that commits itself to affirming life at all costs. Experience is conceived as an Enemy, not to be conquered by turning away from it (‘as to living, our servants will do that for us’) but only by an act of assimilation. Experience conceived as an enemy, the question then becomes: Master or slave, master of experience or slave to it ? And experience itself is of such vast possible extent that to imagine a man capable of assimilating it all is to imagine man swelling like a balloon. He could no longer be man. But Nietzsche was not so intoxicated with the idea of a Super-prophet Super-hero as to set it up like a stone deity. He kept his feet on the earth by weighting them with an infinitely heavy weight, the idea of Eternal Recurrence. By this he insured himself against idealism, against the weightless idealism of Hegel or Leibniz that tied up the Universe in a System and declared: All is for the best in this best of possible worlds. Eternal Recurrence makes Existentialism absolute, or (if this sounds too complicated to make sense) it is the ultimate Act of Faith. Eternal Recurrence and the Superman are not conflicting conceptions; on the contrary, they are so closely connected that they may not on any account be separated. Eternal Recurrence is the condition that keeps the Superman an Existential conception, for the Superman is an Existential and not an ideal conception.* This, of course, is the hurdle on which hundreds of Nietzsche-critics have broken their shins, even that great Nietzschean Nicholas Berdyaev. Mencius said once: ‘Those who follow that part of themselves which is great are great men; those who follow that part of themselves which is little are little men/ This is a religious, not a humanistic conception, and it is the starting-point of the idea of the Superman.
*PAGE NOTE: In this chapter, I have assumed a knowledge of the bases of Nietzsche’s philosophy; the sort of outline that could be picked up from the introduction to any popular edition of Also Sprach Zarathustra. But for the benefit of readers for whom the idea of Eternal Recurrence is a stumbling-block to understanding of Nietzsche’s thought, the following parallels might help to simplify it: first, Shaw in the Third Act of Man and Superman: Don Juan is speaking:
‘...Granted that the great Life Force has hit on the device of the clock-maker’s pendulum, and uses the earth for its bob; granted that the history of each oscillation, that seems so novel to us the actors, is but the history of the last oscillation repeated; nay more, that in the unthinkable infinitude of time the sun throws off the earth and catches it again as a circus rider throws up a ball, and that our agelong epochs are but the moments between the toss and the catch, has the collossal mechanism no purpose?’
As to the nature of the ‘moment of vision’ in which Nietszche conceived Eternal Recurrence, we can only make vague guesses. It would seem to have been a moment of supreme detachment, an Existentialist revelation of the unconnectedness of external nature and the internal ‘ego’: something of the same sort as seems to underly Mind at the End of Its Tether.
‘The manner in which the “I Ching” tends to look upon reality seems to disfavour our causalistic procedures. The moment under actual observation appears to the ancient Chinese view more of a chance hit than a clearly defined result of Concurring causal chain processes. The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation, and not at all the hypothetical reasons that seemingly account for the coincidence.’
This last quotation will be better understood if read in its context, Jung’s Introduction to Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching. It will also make clear that way of dissociating the subject from objective Nature (an Existentialist proceeding which is thoroughly typical of ancient Chinese thought) which is the key to Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Recurrence.
Before I go on to speak of Thus Spake Zarathustra, I should say a few words concerning misunderstanding of the Superman idea. The usual complaint is that Eternal Recurrence is an entirely negative concept, and that the Superman is a humanistic monster. Berdyaev, for instance, writes: ‘Men of real genius ... do not look upon themselves as Supermen for whom all things are lawful... on the contrary, they do great things for the world by subordinating themselves to that which they put above manDostoevsky showed the folly of claiming to be a Superman, a lying idea that is the death of man.’ Anyone who can understand that the Buddhist idea of Nirvana is not simply negative, and that the Buddha himself who (like the Superman) ‘looks down on suffering humanity like a
hillman on the plains’ is not an atheistic monster, will instantly see how this view misses the point. Nietzsche was not an atheist, any more than the Buddha was.* Anyone who reads the Night Song and the Dance Song in Zarathustra will recognize that they spring out of the same emotion as the Vedic or Gathic hymns or the Psalms of David. The idea of the Superman is a response to the need for salvation in precisely the same way that Buddhism was a response to the ‘three signs’. Berdyaev’s criticism (in common with many modern commentators) assumes that the Superman is something personal, like Rule, Britannia or Deutschland uber Alles, an ‘opium of the people’.
Now, the difference between a religious concept and a superstition (an ‘opiate’) is that one corresponds to psychological reality and the other doesn’t; and by ‘psychological reality’ I mean an Outsider’s reality. The Outsider’s problems (I hope everyone would by now agree with me) are real problems, not neurotic delusions. They are not, of course, the sort of problems that everyone confronts every day, and probably the average plumber or stockbroker never confronts them once in a lifetime. But the most practical-minded stockbroker would agree that the question, Where does the universe end ? is not meaningless, and that the man who attaches some impo
rtance to it need not be a neurotic dupe. But if the man answered his own question: The universe is balanced on the back of a bull, which is balanced on the back of an elephant, etc., the stockbroker might be justified in condemning this as an outrage to common sense. In doing so, he would be endorsing the Outsider’s view that metaphysics (i.e. a complete answer to the Outsider’s problems) should be no more than glorified common sense, just as higher mathematics is only glorified arithmetic. And he would involve himself in an admission that to achieve glorified common sense, one would need to develop the ‘glorified’ sensitivity that leads to a perception of the problems that we call Outsider’s problems. All religious teaching is a plea for such development.
In order to understand Nietzsche, we must first of all understand the way he approached the Outsider’s problems, try to place ourselves ‘inside’ him to see as he saw. It is not enough to make this attempt with a volume of Also Sprach Zarathustra in one hand and a modern biography of Nietzsche in the other (most of the books on him that I know are either misinformed, or unfair: the major exception being Daniel Halevy’s biography); what is required is a thorough knowledge of the Outsider as a type. Such a knowledge is the only real ‘key’ to Nietzsche.
In many ways, we shall be in a better position for understanding Nietzsche when we have examined Blake in a later chapter. Blake is very definitely a ‘religious Outsider’, and we shall need Dostoevsky to expand the Outsider’s religious solution before we can appreciate the astounding psychological subtlety of Blake’s approach. But we can say at this point that Blake, in common with another great English mystic, Traherne, achieved a ‘Yea-saying’ vision that brings Van Gogh’s blazing canvases to mind. Blake’s vision expressed itself in phrases like: ‘Energy is eternal delight’, ‘Everything that lives is Holy, life delights in life’. Nietzsche wrote in his Autobiography: ‘I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, and I would prefer even to be a satyr than a saint.’ If we remember what Nietzsche has written of Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy, what his two experiences of’pure will, free of the troubles of intellect’ meant to him, we shall understand how fundamentally similar Nietzsche’s vision was to Blake’s.
