The Consolations of Philosophy
Page 18
The career path offered a Nietzschean lesson in the benefits of wisely interpreted pain:
Don’t talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name all kinds of great men who were not very gifted. They
acquired
greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it) through qualities about whose lack no man aware of them likes to speak: all of them had that diligent seriousness of a craftsman, learning first to construct the parts properly before daring to make a great whole. They allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.
Raphael: studies for Niccolini-Cowper Madonna; Niccolini-Cowper Madonna (Ill. 22.17)
(Ill. 22.18)
Raphael had been able – to use Nietzsche’s terms – to sublimate (sublimieren), spiritualize (vergeistigen) and raise (aufheben) to fruitfulness the difficulties in his path.
14
The philosopher had a practical as well as a metaphorical interest in horticulture. On resigning from Basle University in 1879, Nietzsche had set his heart on becoming a professional gardener. ‘You know that my preference is for a simple, natural way of life,’ he informed his surprised mother, ‘and I am becoming increasingly eager for it. There is no other cure for my health. I need real work, which takes time and induces tiredness without mental strain.’ He remembered an old tower in Naumburg near his mother’s house, which he planned to rent while looking after the adjoining garden. The gardening life began with enthusiasm in September 1879 – but there were soon problems. Nietzsche’s poor eyesight prevented him from seeing what he was trimming, he had difficulty bending his back, there were too many leaves (it was autumn) and after three weeks, he felt he had no alternative but to give up.
Yet traces of his horticultural enthusiasm survived in his philosophy, for in certain passages, he proposed that we should look at our difficulties like gardeners. At their roots, plants can be odd and unpleasant, but a person with knowledge and faith in their potential will lead them to bear beautiful flowers and fruit – just as, in life, at root level, there may be difficult emotions and situations which can nevertheless result, through careful cultivation, in the greatest achievements and joys.
One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis.
(Ill. 22.19)
But most of us fail to recognize the debt we owe to these shoots of difficulty. We are liable to think that anxiety and envy have nothing legitimate to teach us and so remove them like emotional weeds. We believe, as Nietzsche put it, that ‘the higher is not allowed to grow out of the lower, is not allowed to have grown at all … everything first-rate must be causa sui [the cause of itself].’
Yet ‘good and honoured things’ were, Nietzsche stressed, ‘artfully related, knotted and crocheted to … wicked, apparently antithetical things’. ‘Love and hate, gratitude and revenge, good nature and anger … belong together,’ which does not mean that they have to be expressed together, but that a positive may be the result of a negative successfully gardened. Therefore:
The emotions of hatred, envy, covetousness and lust for domination [are] life-conditioning emotions … which must fundamentally and essentially be present in the total economy of life.
To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant.
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
15
It was for their apparent appreciation of the point that Nietzsche looked back in admiration to the ancient Greeks.
It is tempting when contemplating their serene temples at dusk, like those at Paestum, a few kilometres from Sorrento – which Nietzsche visited with Malwida von Meysenbug in early 1877 – to imagine that the Greeks were an unusually measured people whose temples were the outward manifestations of an order they felt within themselves and their society.
This had been the opinion of the great classicist Johann Winckelmann (1717–68) and had won over successive generations of German university professors. But Nietzsche proposed that far from arising out of serenity, classical Greek civilization had arisen from the sublimation of the most sinister forces:
The greater and more terrible the passions are that an age, a people, an individual can permit themselves, because they are capable of employing them as
a means
,
the higher stands their culture
.
The temples might have looked calm, but they were the flowers of well-gardened plants with dark roots. The Dionysiac festivals showed both the darkness and the attempt to control and cultivate it:
Nothing astonishes the observer of the Greek world more than when he discovers that from time to time the Greeks made as it were a festival of all their passions and evil natural inclinations and even instituted a kind of official order of proceedings in the celebration of what was all-too-human in them … They took this all-too-human to be inescapable and, instead of reviling it, preferred to accord it a kind of right of the second rank through regulating it within the usages of society and religion: indeed, everything in man possessing
power
they called divine and inscribed it on the walls of their Heaven. They do not repudiate the natural drive that finds expression in the evil qualities but regulate it and, as soon as they have discovered sufficient prescriptive measures to provide these wild waters with the least harmful means of channeling and outflow, confine them to definite cults and days. This is the root of all the moral free-mindedness of antiquity. One granted to the evil and suspicious … a moderate discharge, and did not strive after their total annihilation.
The Greeks did not cut out their adversities; they cultivated them:
All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, in which they draw their victims down by weight of stupidity – and a later, very much later one in which they marry the spirit, ‘spiritualize’ themselves. In former times, because of the stupidity of passion, people waged war on passion itself: they plotted to destroy it …
Destroying
the passions and desires merely in order to avoid their stupidity and the disagreeable consequences of their stupidity seems to us nowadays to be itself simply an acute form of stupidity. We no longer marvel at dentists who
pull out
teeth to stop them hurting.
(Ill. 22.20)
Fulfilment is reached by responding wisely to difficulties that could tear one apart. Squeamish spirits may be tempted to pull the molar out at once or come off Piz Corvatsch on the lower slopes. Nietzsche urged us to endure.
16
And far from coincidentally, never to drink.
Dear Mother
,
If I write to you today, it is about one of the most unpleasant and painful incidents I have ever been responsible for. In fact, I have misbehaved very badly, and I don’t know whether you can or will forgive me. I pick up my pen most reluctantly and with a heavy heart, especially when I think back to our pleasant life together during the Easter holidays, which was never spoiled by any discord. Last Sunday, I got drunk, and I have no excuse, except that I did not know how much I could take, and I was rather excited in the afternoon
.
So wrote eighteen-year-old Friedrich to his mother Franziska after four glasses of beer in the halls of Attenburg near his school in the spring of 1863. A few years later, at Bonn and Leipzig universities, he felt irritation with his fellow students for their love of alcohol: ‘I often found the expressions of good fellowship in the clubhouse extremely distasteful … I could hardly bear certain individuals because of their beery materialism.’
Nietzsche’s student fraternity at Bonn University.
Nietzsche is in the second row, le
aning to one side.
Note, in the row below, the fraternity beerkeg. (Ill. 22.21)
The attitude remained constant throughout the philosopher’s adult life:
Alcoholic drinks are no good for me; a glass of wine or beer a day is quite enough to make life for me a ‘Vale of Tears’ – Munich is where my antipodes live.
(Ill. 22.22)
‘How much beer there is in the German intelligence!’ he complained. ‘Perhaps the modern European discontent is due to the fact that our forefathers were given to drinking through the entire Middle Ages … The Middle Ages meant the alcohol poisoning of Europe.’
In the spring of 1871, Nietzsche went on holiday with his sister to the Hôtel du Parc in Lugano. The hotel bill for 2–9 March shows that he drank fourteen glasses of milk.
It was more than a personal taste. Anyone seeking to be happy was strongly advised never to drink anything alcoholic at all. Never:
I cannot advise all
more spiritual
natures too seriously to abstain from alcohol absolutely.
Water
suffices.
Why? Because Raphael had not drunk to escape his envy in Urbino in 1504, he had gone to Florence and learned how to be a great painter. Because Stendhal had not drunk in 1805 to escape his despair over L’Homme qui craint d’être gouverné, he had gardened the pain for seventeen years and published De l’amour in 1822:
If you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that [you harbour in your heart] … the
religion of comfortableness
. How little you know of human
happiness
, you comfortable … people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case,
remain small
together.
17
Nietzsche’s antipathy to alcohol explains simultaneously his antipathy to what had been the dominant British school of moral philosophy: Utilitarianism, and its greatest proponent, John Stuart Mill. The Utilitarians had argued that in a world beset by moral ambiguities, the way to judge whether an action was right or wrong was to measure the amount of pleasure and pain it gave rise to. Mill proposed that:
[A]ctions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.
The thought of Utilitarianism, and even the nation from which it had sprung, enraged Nietzsche:
European vulgarity, the plebeianism of modern ideas [is the work and invention of]
England
.
Man does
not
strive for happiness; only the English do that.
He was, of course, also striving for happiness; he simply believed that it could not be attained as painlessly as the Utilitarians appeared to be suggesting:
All these modes of thought which assess the value of things according to
pleasure
and
pain
, that is to say according to attendant and secondary phenomena, are foreground modes of thought and naïveties which anyone conscious of
creative
powers and an artist’s conscience will look down on with derision.
An artist’s conscience because artistic creation offers a most explicit example of an activity which may deliver immense fulfilment but always demands immense suffering. Had Stendhal assessed the value of his art according to the ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ it had at once brought him, there would have been no advance from L’Homme qui craint d’être gouverné to the summit of his powers.
(Ill. 22.23)
Instead of drinking beer in the lowlands, Nietzsche asked us to accept the pain of the climb. He also offered a suggestion for town-planners:
The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is – to
live dangerously
! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!
Vesuvius, exploding in 1879, three years before the above statement was written (Ill. 22.24)
And if one were still tempted to have a drink, but had no high opinion of Christianity, Nietzsche added a further argument to dissuade one from doing so. Anyone who liked drinking had, he argued, a fundamentally Christian outlook on life:
To believe that wine
makes cheerful
I would have to be a Christian, that is to say believe what is for me in particular an absurdity.
18
He had more experience of Christianity than of alcohol. He was born in the tiny village of Röcken near Leipzig in Saxony. His father, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, was the parson, his deeply devout mother was herself the daughter of a parson, David Ernst Oehler, who took services in the village of Pobles an hour away. Their son was baptized before an assembly of the local clergy in Röcken church in October 1844.
(Ill. 22.25)
Friedrich loved his father, who died when he was only four, and revered his memory throughout his life. On the one occasion when he had a little money, after winning a court case against a publisher in 1885, he ordered a large headstone for his father’s grave on which he had carved a quotation from Corinthians (1 Cor 13.8):
Die Liebe höret nimmer auf
Charity never faileth
‘He was the perfect embodiment of a country pastor,’ Nietzsche recalled of Carl Ludwig. ‘A tall, delicate figure, a fine-featured face, amiable and beneficent. Everywhere welcomed and beloved as much for his witty conversation as for his warm sympathy, esteemed and loved by the farmers, extending blessings by word and deed in his capacity as a spiritual guide.’
(Ill. 22.26)
Yet this filial love did not prevent Nietzsche from harbouring the deepest reservations about the consolation that his father, and Christianity in general, could offer those in pain:
I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible charge any prosecutor has ever uttered. To me it is the extremest thinkable form of corruption … [it] has left nothing untouched by its depravity … I call Christianity the
one
great curse, the
one
great intrinsic depravity …
One does well to put gloves on when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do so … Everything in it is cowardice, everything is self-deception and closing one’s eyes to oneself … Do I still have to add that in the entire New Testament there is only
one
solitary figure one is obliged to respect? Pilate, the Roman governor.
Quite simply:
It is indecent to be a Christian today.
19
How does the New Testament console us for our difficulties? By suggesting that many of these are not difficulties at all but rather virtues:
If one is worried about timidity, the New Testament points out
:
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. (Matthew 5.5)
If one is worried about having no friends, the New Testament suggests
:
Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil … your reward is great in heaven. (Luke 6.22–3)
If one is worried about an exploitative job, the New Testament advises
:
Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh …
Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ. (Colossians 3.22–4)
If one is worried at having no money, the New Testament tells us
:
>
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. (Mark 10.25)
There may be differences between such words and a drink but Nietzsche insisted on an essential equivalence. Both Christianity and alcohol have the power to convince us that what we previously thought deficient in ourselves and the world does not require attention; both weaken our resolve to garden our problems; both deny us the chance of fulfilment:
The two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
Christianity had, in Nietzsche’s account, emerged from the minds of timid slaves in the Roman Empire who had lacked the stomach to climb to the tops of mountains, and so had built themselves a philosophy claiming that their bases were delightful. Christians had wished to enjoy the real ingredients of fulfilment (a position in the world, sex, intellectual mastery, creativity) but did not have the courage to endure the difficulties these goods demanded. They had therefore fashioned a hypocritical creed denouncing what they wanted but were too weak to fight for while praising what they did not want but happened to have. Powerlessness became ‘goodness’, baseness ‘humility’, submission to people one hated ‘obedience’ and, in Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘not-being-able-to-take-revenge’ turned into ‘forgiveness’. Every feeling of weakness was overlaid with a sanctifying name, and made to seem ‘a voluntary achievement, something wanted, chosen, a deed, an accomplishment’. Addicted to ‘the religion of comfortableness’, Christians, in their value system, had given precedence to what was easy, not what was desirable, and so had drained life of its potential.