in Nietzsche Studien, Vol. 22 (1993) Michael Platt
In what follows I shall offer an interpretation of one of the strangest philosophical books ever written. If I am right, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo is unlike any of the books it is designed to resemble, celebrates one new virtue, advances a new order of the virtues, is an indispensable preface to all of Nietzsche’s work, the most authoritative account of his life there will ever be, the summation of his life, and perhaps the culmination of his work.
I. Nietzsche on Nietzsche
There is no Homer on Homer, no Moses on Moses, no Sophocles on Sophocles, no Aristotle on Aristotle, no Tacitus on Tacitus, no Aquinas on Aquinas, no Ibn Khaldûn on Ibn Khaldûn, no Chaucer on Chaucer, no Machiavelli on Machiavelli, no Giorgione on Giorgione, little Shakespeare on Shakespeare,[i] no Bach on Bach, no Kleist on Kleist, and no Thucydides on Thucydides. There is, however, Nietzsche on Nietzsche.[ii]
Nietzsche is one of a small number of great souls who have presented an account of their own life. His Ecce Homo is his Apology, his Commentary on the Civil Wars, his Crucifixion and Last Words, his Confessions, his Essais, his Discourse of the Method, his Autobiography, his Confessions and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, his Prelude, his Poetry and Truth and his Conversations with Eckermann, his Point of View of My Work as an Author, and his Letter on Humanism. Ecce Homo is also like Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait of 1660,” or Van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait of January-February 1888” in which the art portrayed is the same as the art employed to portray the artist. Nevertheless, the mode of composition is more musical than painterly. Ecce Homo is a joyful da capo hymn to himself such as no composer has attempted.
Ecce Homo is Nietzsche on Nietzsche, and Nietzsche on Nietzsche is unlike any other great soul on itself.
Throughout his life Nietzsche compared himself to Sokrates and near the end, in Götzen-Dämmerung (Twilight of the Idols), he came close to according the Greek pied piper an enigmatic depth equal to his own. Here his description of himself as a decadent who has overcome his malaise puts him with the Sokrates who, as Nietzsche noted, confessed he was a monster who conquered himself. “Know thyself” was, however, not his maxim; to become himself, Nietzsche had to submit to an idea which has gathered up all his mistakes, illnesses, and fragments and now makes him a destiny. Nietzsche’s daimonion does not restrain the philosopher, as Sokrates’ did, but eggs him on.
Thus, the charges Sokrates answers in his Apology are ones Nietzsche is proud to plead guilty to. Not only does he question the god of Europe, he attacks him, and “introduce” is too pale a word for the exuberant way Nietzsche hails the new “divinity” or being, Zarathustra. Does Nietzsche corrupt youth? He would if he could, but when he wrote Ecce Homo he was an ignored man. In the agora of Europe, no one recognized his near-sighted and far-eared visage and no Aristophanes had satirized him. “Put me on trial” his Apology, Ecce Homo, demands. “Put me on trial so that I can corrupt the youth.” In the Crito Sokrates supports the laws of civil society, even those of the city that condemned him. In Ecce Homo and elsewhere, Nietzsche condemns the laws of European civil society, one of whose universities supported him with a professorship and later with a pension. Nietzsche was neither citizen nor citizen philosopher like Sokrates. To Aristotle’s remark at the beginning of the Politics: “That man who lives outside the city must be either a beast or a god,” Nietzsche riposted: “leaving out the third case: one must be both — a philosopher.” (Götzen-Dämmerung, II, No. 3) Or, we must add: a hermit of Sils Maria, a walker in arcaded Turin, and a wanderer between Alp and Mediterranean Sea, for after resigning his Basel professorship in 1878 Nietzsche had no home, only various haunts, watering holes, and Alpine pastures, which he visited like brief habits. That he regretted his only deed as a citizen, volunteering as a nurse in Bismarck’s swift war against France in 1870, is clear from the way he attacks Germany and lauds France in Ecce Homo and elsewhere. However, according to Nietzsche himself, Ecce Homo is a civil deed. By declaring that he is ready to rule the world, he refutes Sokrates — far from shunning rule, the best want to rule (Zarathustra III, 12.21). If we are to believe Nietzsche’s Apology, his attack on Europe is for the sake of a super-Europe, of which he is the first citizen.
The sentiment of amor fati in Ecce Homo makes it a kind of “Confessions.” At the end of his Confessions, Augustine blesses every chance, every confusion, every evil, in his life and in life as a whole. So does Nietzsche. At the end of his Confessions, Augustine nonetheless strives to save the souls of others. So, in his way, does Nietzsche. Yet his “Confessions” are addressed to no creator God. Their author is more solitary than Augustine and, thus, more fearfully dependent on himself. Augustine’s Confessions are a love song to God, Nietzsche’s a solitary love song to himself. Augustine’s Confessions tell us how he sought what he later came to know as his Creator, how he comes to see himself as a sinning creature, and thus is readied for the graceful gift of salvation. It is a story of how an original sinner became the saint he then truly was. It is the subtitle of Nietzsche’s “Confessions”: “How One Becomes What One Is” that hints at the story in Ecce Homo. It points to the section, the only one that arranges its material chronologically, about Nietzsche’s “so gute Bücher.” Clearly Zarathustra is the book in and by and through which Nietzsche became what he was. Yet precisely here Nietzsche’s solitude seems to vanish; here his “Confessions” become a love song not to himself, but to Zarathustra. Is Zarathustra something Nietzsche wrote and created? Or, is it something or someone that was revealed to him? In Ecce Homo Nietzsche says both. Nietzsche could almost say of Zarathustra, what Augustine says of God, you were there hidden in my beginning guiding me. Almost, not quite. Zarathustra is not the God who watches every hair on an Augustine’s head. What Augustine recounts would exist for him even if he never wrote — Zarathustra unwritten does not exist. Only as a writer then can Nietzsche bless his life. And also present it. Having lost the Watchful, Loving Creator God, Nietzsche is more solitary than Augustine, but also more dependent on other men. To become what he was Nietzsche had to present himself in Ecce Homo. Nietzsche could have been wise and sagacious without writing, but he could not have been a destiny without writing the good books he did write. Just as the gift-giving Zarathustra of Zarathustra I needs men to give to, so Nietzsche needs readers; just as the pregnant Zarathustra of Zarathustra IV awaits his children, so the Nietzsche of Ecce Homo awaits readers, recruits, philosophers of the future. Looking forward, Nietzsche in Ecce Homo tries to become a destiny; looking backward, he loves fate.
Nietzsche wanted to love himself well and also entirely. Augustine wanted to love himself well and could not do so until he saw that God did utterly (and always had). Sokrates was content to know himself, or try to, and love or despise himself accordingly.
The question of friendship links Ecce Homo with the Essais of Montaigne. In their meandering course, Montaigne reveals much about his intelligent, diverse and ondoyant self. His turning away from public life was no violent conversion. From his tower he did not expect to sight heaven; on its rafters are human maxims: “Que sçay je?” (What do I know?) and “homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto” (I am a man and count nothing human alien to me). His Essais are a preparation for death addressed not to God, but to himself, and to friends, both dead and yet to live. Only once does the urbane, intelligent Lord of Montaigne grow entirely earnest, nearly ardent, almost reverent. What most deeply stirs him is the recollection of his dead friend Etienne de La Boétie. Nietzsche lived entirely in a tower and his “Essais,” his “Of friendship,” Ecce Homo, is addressed to old friends still living. In it he tells them more about who he is than he had ever told them in letters. To them Ecce Homo seems to say, “Know me?—You never knew me. Know me now. Hail and farewell.” What Nietzsche would have been if he had had a friend, such as Montaigne had in Etienne, is hard to say.
Wagner and Lou Salome were the only living candidates, but they fell away. That Wagner fell away by choosing to make peace with the German Reich, with a coarse, enthusiastic public, and in Parsifal with Christianity is more trying to Nietzsche than Wagner’s death in his arms would have been. Disappointment with Wagner, regret at having served him, and a sense of betrayal by him, all touch Nietzsche, but he overcomes them in his celebration of their many meetings at Tribschen and in his ranking of them as the finest meetings in his life. Meetings, or near meetings? Did they understand each other? Nietzsche tells us that what they shared was suffering from life and from each other. At age seven, Nietzsche knew he was alone. Now he tells us solitude is a virtue.
If great gifts and virtues are required for friendship, no man was more apt than Nietzsche, but if such gifts are rare, no man was more likely to be solitary. In a letter, Nietzsche once wrote:
Es lebt übrigens jetzt Niemand, an dem mir v i e l gelegen wäre; die Menschen, die ich gerne habe, sind lange, lange todt, z. B. der Abbé Galiani oder Henry Beyle oder Montaigne.
Actually, there’s no one living whom I could care much about; those I really like are long, long dead, e.g., Abbé Galiani or Henry Beyle or Montaigne. (14 March 1885)[iii]
That he delivered this judgment to a living person (rather than keeping it in his diary)[iv] shows both his detachment from humanity and his suffering from it. The “friend” most present in Ecce Homo is not Wagner, or Cosima, or Lou von Salomé, or Overbeck, or Peter Gast, or Burckhardt, but Zarathustra, someone who could not be described as “long, long dead” because he was never really alive, certainly not as alive as Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s understanding of friendship excludes intimacy, deliberately and reluctantly. You should not look upon your friend sleeping or try to guess her dreams. Towards dead friends like Montaigne or yet to live ones, say Rilke, Heidegger, or Strauss, Nietzsche maintains a star friendship. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche is a burning light; occasionally a twinkle from such another star may reach him, but such lights never embrace; if they meet, it is only in collision. Yet this self-sufficient, solitary star needs a European public to become the destiny he is. He needs pupils, disciples, and followers more than he needs friends. Finally, one might ask whether the author of Ecce Homo is a friend to himself. Does he treat himself as a friend, even a star friend?
II. Behold Me, Not Them
Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo is also related to three modern thinkers who have felt called to present themselves to the public: Descartes, Rousseau, and Kierkegaard.
Nothing is more prominent in Descartes’ fabulously autobiographical Discourse of the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason than the word “I.” Descartes’ proof of his own existence not only comes before his proof of God’s, but grounds it. The God of Descartes springs from the ratiocinative head of Descartes and also never leaves it. God is the creature, indeed a servile one, and Descartes the creator. (If it were otherwise, He would be an evil genius.) It is not accidental that Descartes’ cogito ergo sum is creative in the image of the creative God. The six parts of the Discourse remind us of the six days of Genesis; for God-Descartes they point to humanity’s day of rest in which men will walk directly in the morning, plan cities at noon and geometrize in the evening forever and ever. Although the pre-methodical Descartes sets out as a resolute walker in a forest, he soon comforts himself by certifying his existence, by adopting the method, and by resolving to master nature. At the end of the sixth Discourse ‘day’ Descartes claims to be a soldier, indeed a general who has won the decisive battle, in a war to make courage superfluous. Descartes was something worse than a Last Man, a great man who wanted, after his great labors, to become a Last Man. The Nietzsche we meet in Ecce Homo walks vigorously in the morning and in the afternoon; in the night he sings; and all day and all night, he loves himself too much to become God. Ecce Homo is not a conquest of death because it is a preparation for it. Descartes said, “Seeing that I am imperfect and wish to be perfect, there must be a God,” whereas Nietzsche seems to say, “If there were God, how could I not be him.”
In Ecce Homo there is none of Rousseau’s concern with displaying himself, and his amours, which makes the Confessions a vain exhibition of the author and a coy seduction of the reader. In the way modern Americans on a bus or a train talk loudly about their “sex lives” to strangers, Nietzsche would have seen indelicacy, a lack of thresholds, and a want of cleanliness. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche says nothing of such things, nothing about the disappointments in love he may have borne. Fräulein Lou von Salomé is mentioned only as the author of a fine poem; Frau Cosima Wagner is mentioned in an entirely veiled manner. That Freud complained of Ecce Homo that it did not say enough about the author’s “sex life” only reveals his dogmatic indelicacy and incomprehension of all things noble.[v] Rousseau said man was born free and good, but in his own Confessions shows he was born slave and bad, and yet he shows this without shame. True, Nietzsche admits in Ecce Homo to being a decadent, but without the shameful details, because he thought overcoming the base to be dignifying.
Moreover, for Nietzsche shame is something noble; the highest men often hide the best things about themselves. Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo bears more resemblance to Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker than his Confessions. In them Rousseau to some degree overcomes the amour propre he complains so much of and the compassion he suffered so much from. From an accidental meeting with a hurtling dog, Rousseau attained a blissful sentiment of his own existence. Jean Jacques forgot he was Rousseau. When he remembered who he was, he interpreted his collision as fated and loved the Creator who destined it — a moment that resembles Nietzsche’s blessing all his accidents without, in his case, thanking a Creator and without desiring to forget who he was. Rousseau opposed happiness to history; Nietzsche sought to identify them. Rousseau’s life was a distraction that seldom allowed him to dwell happily in that from which he was distracted; Nietzsche’s was an experiment for the sake of thinking. The human task as Nietzsche saw it was to love history (and yet make the coming future different).
Like Rousseau and like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche feared misinterpreters; Ecce Homo is his “Dialogues” and his Point of View of My Work as an Author, for in it he aims to set right all his readers, extant and yet to be. Ecce Homo is the first secondary work on Nietzsche and all later ones are by nature attempts to replace or confirm it. Most ignore it. You can lead a horse to water, you can with brawn force his head into it, but you cannot make him drink a drop from it. Then again, when a subtle, artful man suddenly says, “Let me be frank with you; all along I have meant one thing,” watch out; he is probably only half frank, and that half to cover the other. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche love the ironic Sokrates, both are artful, and both claim to be frank, but they may not be.
On the vacillating state of the West, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard agree; the West is not Christian and it is not something else. Nietzsche’s remark that modernity is “Eine Zeitung an Stelle der tägliche Gebete” (“Daily newspapers in place of daily prayers”) would have pleased the suffering Dane.[vi] His general description of contemporary Europe as “Christian morals without the Christian God”[vii] accords with Kierkegaard’s general claim that it is more difficult to be a Christian in Christendom than in times of persecution. While Kierkegaard contrasts reasonable morality with Christian faith — Abraham being either a child-killer or a knight of faith, Nietzsche contrasts the natural love of life with the holy hatred of it; Nietzsche was pro-life.[viii] As their perspectives differ, so do their solutions. Whereas Kierkegaard would restore the Christian God, Nietzsche would get rid of Christian morals. In Paul, Christ became the spirit of revenge incarnate. However, there is a twist at the end of Nietzsche’s rope. Christian, that is Pauline, morals traduced the Christian God. There was only one Christian and he died on the Cross. Christian morals have always been without the Christian God. Not strangely, Kierkegaard would agree.
III. Sokrates with the Soul of Christ.
It should not surprise us then that the words of Nietzsche’s title “Ecce Homo” are the very words of Pilate beholding Jesus (John 19:5).[ix] Since Nietzsche is both the beholder and the beheld in Ecce Homo; this means he must be a kind of Pilate beholding Pilate, or a Christ beholding Christ, or perhaps Roman Pilate beholding the soul of Christ. Nietzsche’s title then recalls the remark in his Nachlass (leftovers) about the Übermensch being “Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ.”[x] Thus, if Nietzsche’s “Ecce Homo” makes him a kind of Caesar/Christ beholding himself, Nietzsche must have overcome the incompatibility of Caesar, who ruled the world but did not suffer and bless it, and Christ, who suffered and blessed the world but would not rule it. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche does suffer and bless the world and he does declare his readiness to rule it. Yet in Ecce Homo there is something divine as well. In it Nietzsche enjoys the seventh day rest of a God strolling in the cool of autumn among his creatures. Because of his Zarathustra — the work of forty days and forty nights — he finds the whole of his creation very good or, what is the same for Nietzsche, “very evil.” Heady with the cider of good and evil, this deluge-commanding Noah is ready for a free death.
The subtitle of Ecce Homo: “How one becomes what one is” seems to yoke God and nature with violence. We create ourselves, yet we have a nature. This contradiction is resolved as follows: self-creating is not exnihilic. Man starts with the block he is and knocks off parts of it to get to nature. It is hardly easy. Like a sculptor cutting away stone to make his self portrait, a man must be hard on himself; to make “what he really is” stand out, he must cut himself as he now is. All the foresight, cunning and energy once attributed to the out-of-nothing Creative God are needed by man to become what he is, but because man starts with something, not nothing, he must destroy to create. A clean, gentle, innocent beginning is not possible for man. Like God starting over with a flood, man must destroy much that was once dear to him to make anything good of himself. The union of Caesar and Christ that Nietzsche’s title points to is both a work of art and a growth of nature.
That Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo is divided into four parts, on his wisdom, on his sagacity, on his good books and on his destiny, allows us to distinguish Nietzsche on Nietzsche from all his predecessors, especially Sokrates, Plato and Christ.[xi] For unlike the ignorant Sokrates, Nietzsche claims to be wise (EH I) and sagacious (EH II), and unlike Sokrates before the Athenian court, Nietzsche actually claims to introduce a new god and wants to corrupt the young. Nietzsche also claims to be made of good wood. Then in the third part of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche tells us that Plato used “Sokrates” to discover himself, just as Nietzsche used Schopenhauer; the third part itself shows that Nietzsche writes better books than Plato, for “Zarathustra” is better than Sokrates.[xii] In the fourth part Nietzsche claims to be a destiny, who brings tidings of a great crisis, who like Christ “breaks history in two” and who like Christ (Matthew 24:4) and John of Revelations foresees “wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth.” He too, has his disciple Peter (Heinrich Köselitz) whom he too has renamed (Peter Gast, Peter ‘the Guest’). Like the Gospels then, Ecce Homo, offers four overlapping accounts of a new divinity. Like Luke, Nietzsche is a physician and healer; as Matthew once did, he will soon collect taxes. Like John beloved by Christ, Nietzsche is beloved by his Zarathustra, and like John he is a theologian. The resemblance is deliberate on Nietzsche’s part; of all previous figures to which Nietzsche invites comparison, one finally stands out: Christ. Like Christ, Nietzsche has an invisible genealogy; although you might think Christ had a Jewish father, really his father was heavenly. So likewise although you might think Nietzsche had German parents, really he is Polish. The fact that Nietzsche, like his Zarathustra, lasted beyond the 33 Christ died at, is not insignificant, for Zarathustra speaks of Christ as the one who died too young. Perhaps it is even significant that Nietzsche disappeared at 44 or 4 times 11, rather than 3 times 11.[xiii] More important of course, like Christ, Nietzsche is a healer, a teacher, a prophet, and a destiny.
Yet the greatest resemblance seems only to bring out the greatest difference; for Nietzsche concludes Ecce Homo: “Have I been understood? — Dionysus versus the Crucified.”[xiv] This is usually understood to mean Nietzsche is the Dionysus, but it may not be so. Dionysus and Christ, both gods, both suffering for man, but only Christ is a teacher and lover, as Nietzsche is. Likewise his Zarathustra, whose greatest temptation is pity, whose greatest perturbation is nausea at man, whose greatest struggle is with regret, anger, vengeance and resentiment, and whose greatest victory is the amor fati implicit in his loving celebration of eternity at the end of Part Three. All this is like Christ not Dionysus. Moreover, since it is the task of Nietzsche, he would say his destiny, to unite all that is richest and yet most contradictory in the past of man so far, he would surely have to unite Dionysus and Christ. His Zarathustra shows such an attempt on Zarathustra’s part and is such an attempt on Nietzsche’s part. Although he suffers, as a teacher and a lover, Zarathustra does not perish, as Dionysus and Christ do. Perhaps he may be better described as a Sokrates with the soul of Christ, for the view of human things Zarathustra achieves in Part IV is comic, like Sokrates’, and yet the virtue he achieves is, like Christ’s, one of love. So, too, Nietzsche, in imitation of his hero, and his heroes, in Ecce Homo, tries to unite Dionysus, Sokrates and Christ. How this might be is hard to see.
Because no one else was like Nietzsche, Nietzsche cannot be finally and fully understood through others. To turn then to Nietzsche, let us return to Ecce Homo and read it.
IV. Ecce Homo as a Preface
In being Nietzsche on Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is is many things at once. It is a guide for the living, especially for any seeking to become “who one really is.” That might place Ecce Homo on the “self-help” shelf in today’s bookstores, but it being for philosophers of the future, and by a psychologist of the soul, not the psyche, let alone the self, would soon assign it elsewhere, to “clearance” if his name were not recognized. In being Nietzsche’s birthday present to himself, Ecce Homo is a demonstration of proper self-love, not diluted by the love of neighbor it criticizes, and yet in its expression of gratitude to others, among the dead Sokrates especially and among the living Wagner especially, it testifies to the virtue Nietzsche says is fundamental to all the others. It is also an epilogue to his life, a fulfillment of that life, and because it expresses amor fati so robustly, it is a demonic weight on the reader. By age 44 could you face your life so happily? But for all of us approaching Nietzsche, Ecce Homo is a preface to the works, and thus both a guide for first readers, and a warning to all mis-readers. In examining Ecce Homo for its guidance in reading Nietzsche, it is important to remember all of these featured purposes, for each makes it the guide it is.
Of course, it will be impossible to read Ecce Homo, consult it as a guide, on anything, if we know it is not serious; or if we think the risk of reading it too great.
As to the risk, it is hard to judge for others. Great books may be dangerous. The Platonic dialogues are dangerous; in them some grown-up, solid citizen is always being shown up as ignorant, some good young men are always looking on, or one of them getting the stuffing of good opinions knocked out of him by direct Sokratic interrogation. Aristotle wrote differently because he thought these dialogues dangerous. The Gospels may be dangerous too. The maxims are so absolute; the parables so deep; one teaching pulls one way; and a later one in another direction. Perhaps some later Christians wrote differently because they thought so. Dangerous too may be Nietzsche. Certainly his reputation suggests it. Some of his many students, such as Strauss, may have written differently as a consequence. Moreover, a few months after Nietzsche wrote Ecce Homo, he went mad, and for the next eleven years until he died sunk him more and more in inarticulate suffering. Some think Nietzsche was already mad, or nearly so, when he wrote Ecce Homo, that the madness was already erupting in the book, or even driving Nietzsche to write such a thing; but others think that the thoughts in it and the writing of them led to the madness. Was madness the cause of the book, or did the book cause the madness? However, still others deny that there is any relation between Ecce Homo and the madness overtook its author.[xv] In any case, the only way to decide if there is madness in Ecce Homo is to read the book.
As to whether Ecce Homo is a book, in the highest sense, the only way to find out is, likewise, to read it, and to read it assuming that it is a book, that it is coherent, ordered, designed, neat, beautiful. Start with the opposite assumption and you will never find out if it is a book. As to whether it is serious, again the only way to find out is to read it as if it is serious. Only this assumption encourages the reader to do the work a serious reader always has to do in order to be rewarded. “Read and read.” The opposite assumption leads to its own ‘confirmation.’ Effortlessly.
Let us begin with the title. It points two ways. The words “Ecce Homo” announce that the subject is a man, one who both points to himself and steps forward to address us. Will this be like Tocqueville’s Souvenirs, written primarily for the author’s self-knowledge, or like Richard III’s opening soliloquy on himself, uttered primarily to seduce us? Most people who want to tell us about themselves are bores, they do not know themselves, and thus cannot know anything else. However, right off Nietzsche comes to us because he serves some higher purpose. What will be his difficult demand? If we are not offended by Nietzsche’s contempt for his contemporaries, we may side with him. Certainly he is witty. Perhaps we are fascinated. Or is he mad? What does it mean to die as your father and live on as your mother?[xvi] What does he mean, that Caesar or Alexander or Dionysus might be his father? Horatio thought Hamlet “too curious” when he traced his dusty lineage to the same Plutarchean heroes. Is a hero ever a hero to his friend? Especially if he be witty?
Moreover, the interleaf that follows the Preface is a genuine soliloquy, something the man says to himself, something we only overhear. He tells his life to himself, on his birthday, because his whole life has been good. He is happy, so perhaps he means us well. Of Natasha at her first ball, Tolstoy says she was so happy she could not sin. Nietzsche certainly seems happy, so perhaps he can mean no evil. Also, it seems he tells us only what he tells himself. So, perhaps he is trustworthy.
Although the title of Ecce Homo points to someone other than the reader, the subtitle: “How One Becomes What One Is” invites the reader, at least the reader who wants to become what he is, to seek instruction. It seems that by beholding this someone, by looking away from ourselves and beholding him, we will learn how to become what we are. Or perhaps we will learn what we are; after all, the title also says “Behold Man” so maybe by looking at man, or this man, we will learn how to become a man. Nietzsche is who he is, no one else could possibly be him, but he is also what he is and that might permit imitation.[xvii]
Read before anything else of Nietzsche’s, Ecce Homo has much to give us in the way of guidance. For one thing it tells us that the usual separation of life and work does not obtain. There is not the life on the one hand and the works on the other. Although distinct, they are not separate. Nietzsche’s life was lived as an experiment and his books were written both as an expression of such living and as a part of it. The four parts of Ecce Homo make one instructive whole. The wisdom and sagacity (Klugheit) of the man are present in the good books he writes and all three, wisdom, sagacity, and books, make him a destiny.[xviii] Hence, such matters as whether one should drink coffee, or whether Nietzsche should, are connected to the history of the West or rather to the history of the whole earth. Hence also the linking of the proper names of Nietzsche’s haunts and the dates he frequented them to such a momentous thing as the coming of the idea of the eternal return of the same. Life and work are so related that everything about Nietzsche is momentous. Nietzsche’s illnesses, insomnia, and headaches are painful, but never trivial.
Here we are dealing with a man who claims to have achieved perfection in the life and in the work. Such a claimed unity would seem to justify the attention an interpreter might give to Nietzsche’s letters and Nachlass (leftovers). (Of which more later.) However, Nietzsche says that he is one thing and his works another. The kind of perfection in each is not the same. Art is very important in life, and as we shall see, very important in Nietzsche’s life, but he understood the difference.[xix] Nietzsche’s life was marred by inheritances, accidents, mistakes, burdens, disappointments, regrets, sufferings; he met them; he suffered them; he overcame them; his books show it; and once he was fingered by fate, his books had nothing to do with accident. Yet they would not be perfect if his life were not good; so Nietzsche begins with his life. That is where the reader should begin, Nietzsche thinks. It is right to ask of a demanding author, what does he demand of himself? What was his life like?
Since he has achieved a certain perfection in his life, Nietzsche claims to be our teacher. What does he tell us on first reading? First of all he tells us, in the proud, prankish titles of his four parts that proper self-love is the fundamental theme and the fundamental virtue. Although he often praises courage, especially intellectual courage, and although he exhibits enormous intellect, and even sometimes praises it, still Nietzsche regards self-love as the fundamental virtue. This virtue is at once something that depends on yourself and on reality. To be able to love yourself you have to be lovable. And then you must not leave your virtues and deeds in the lurch, by falling out of love with them.
In some degree this is possible for all souls. However, there is an order of rank of souls, and the higher up the ladder of rank you climb, the more you may become something rare and even very rare — unique. Thus at the end of the four parts, Nietzsche himself is most Nietzsche and most a destiny, something whose commanding nature is evident to all men. He is most who he is and most what he is, both. Thus the virtues of the first two sections, wisdom and sagacity, are far more open to most men. No one will be the Nietzsche who is a destiny, few will write such good books as Nietzsche has, but quite a few may be as sagacious (klug) as he, and many may be as wise as he. You will notice that this reverses every other tablet of virtues we have heard of, for wisdom is not the end and crown but the beginning and base of the virtues. It also quite specificly reverses the Platonic quartet of virtues, in ways we shall examine later. (We set aside for the moment whether the lower virtues are transformed by the higher ones.)
So, what is wisdom? What does the first part of the book, “Why I Am So Wise” tell us about wisdom. Upon first reading, it tells us that wisdom is right disposition toward the given, towards one’s nature, towards one’s parents, one’s genealogy, and toward suffering. There is enough good in what you begin with so that you should feel gratitude, and enough evil so that virtue is an achievement — and for that too you should feel gratitude. Thus, Nietzsche is thankful for his body, for his fundamental health, for his parents, including his ghostly father, and for being born in Germany, in the modern era. Never do we feel that he would prefer any of this different.
Not that all of life is lovable. All life is suffering. Nietzsche’s life has been one long, and increasing agony; pain and debility have haunted him, impeded him; and regret has accused him. Although he emphasizes the sufferings of the body, as is proper for an honest celebrant of the body, and an honest warrior against anti-nature, there are other sufferings he mentions, above all the disappointment of so many mistakes in life, of having to deal as a boy with those visited upon him, and later those he visited upon himself.[xx] Other sufferings he only alludes to. The greatest is unrequited love. This man who possessed such great gifts was rejected by those he loved best. By Wagner, by Cosima, by Burckhardt, and by Lou von Salomé. This great teacher bearing such great gifts was rejected by nearly everyone. Or so it seemed to him. Certainly during his life there was an incommensurability between his gifts and his friends.
What is wisdom? In the beginning, in the boy and youth, it is a low sense; it is the sense of smell, the ability to sense what stinks, the strength to avoid it; in the young man, in the young teacher and writer, it is nausea, the rejection of what is base and yet not always the avoidance of it, but often the suffering of it. Not the opposing of it, except to suffer it, to take no counter-measures, but to endure it. Anger is a perturbation of the soul. No philosopher suffered more from anger than Nietzsche, or talked less of it. He preferred to talk of the virtue that overcomes it, amor fati. This is not the virtue that casts it out.
You will note that with this wisdom as with sagacity to follow, the first signs of it are negative, or more exactly defensive. In life for a long time we know better what we do not like than what we do like, and then among the many things we like it is a long time before we recognize the one that alone we were made for. As it grows the virtue of wisdom must be heroic. It is heroic when it makes solitary war, the rules of which Nietzsche provides, and heroicly magnanimous when it conquers. Only then, in victory over oneself and in peace, can it become sweet, taking pleasure in things that would have been hindrances during war, with a moderation in regard to oneself that is nearly abstemious, and yet a display of these pleasures for others that is lavish. The exception should not insist on becoming the rule. And the extraordinary should not mind serving the ordinary sometimes.
Nietzsche tells us that wisdom is the love of this suffering. Amor fati is the love of everything you suffer for the sake of everything that that suffering drives you to achieve, to write, to be. Already we sense then, that Nietzsche could only write this part because the other parts, especially the Third and Fourth, follow. Still, for others, wisdom is possible with less than unique and even less than great achievements. Self-love that includes love of your suffering is possible for all.
The link between Part One, on wisdom, and Part Two, on sagacity, is solitude. Suffering isolates. Pain isolates. You feel it and no one else. Pain is always your pain. Others can only increase it, or decrease it, not feel it. The pity of others only increases your pain. Debility isolates even more. If you are Nietzsche, you have to stay indoors for days; you can’t plan anything; all meetings are uncertain, conditional, “If I am well,” and even, he sometimes felt, “If I am still alive.” And unrequited love isolates even more. But since the virtue of wisdom is self-love, attaining it means realizing that the solitude that suffering exposes one to is good, is lovable. Finally, it means being impervious to whether your love is requited, so great is your self-love.
It is only in this solitude that knowledge of nature and of one’s own nature is likely. It took suffering and solitude to teach Nietzsche what climate was good for him, what cuisine, what order of the day, what daily exercises, and thus what way of daily life was best for him. This is sagacity: to know what habits, brief and long, are conducive to becoming what you are. Sagacity is Nietzsche’s name for self-knowledge. First self-love, then through it self-knowledge, and then teaching and ruling, is the order of how the virtues become what they are in a man.
Only when you have become what you are could you possibly know yourself. “Nosce te ipsum” is not a command good for youth. It will only lead to something premature, some liaison, union, or job, some niche that will forever forestall becoming who you are. Endurance, discipline, patience are needed to keep going, to live through all the many sideroads, mistakes, fragments that will fall into their proper subordinate places when the “organizing ‘idea’ that is meant to rule” you finally takes command. Here Nietzsche accords with the experience of all inquiry. If you knew, knew fully, what you were seeking, you would have it now and not be seeking it. And if you knew nothing about what you were seeking, you wouldn’t be seeking, and certainly wouldn’t find it. In especial, this is true of the man, such as Nietzsche, who is to be someone the like of whom there has never been before. Toward such a destiny, no one, living or dead, can point the way.
If wisdom as Nietzsche understands it, including self-love and self-discipline, is a fundamental expression of nature in oneself, certainly in himself, someone made of good wood, then sagacity is a choice of virtue. Wisdom makes you endure well, with good spirits and good benefit, what you begin with; sagacity allows you to choose what is best for you. Thus in the one part Nietzsche expresses gratitude for home, homeland, and parents, in the other part, he chooses other cuisines, other climes, other places, and by implication other parents. Thus, he now prefers the cuisine of Piedmont to that of Thuringia; likewise, he now finds that dry, sunlit climes are best for a man with a spiritual task. Finally, we must count the four major authors he mentions under “recreation” (Pascal, Stendhal, Heine, and Shakespeare) as his choices; these others replace parents for the mature man, and were perhaps important for the youth. What might be vital for a youth, say as misperceived but so important as Schopenhauer was for Nietzsche, becomes recreation for the man who knows his task. Thus Nietzsche’s sagacity will restrict the claims that even good things make on his time.
Sagacity is also, certainly for Nietzsche, the virtue that protects solitude. As knowledge of the right climate, cuisine, and habits, it substitutes for moderation in the Platonic quartet, and as protection of solitude, it substitutes for justice in the Platonic quartet, since like justice it is right relation to other people. Nietzsche’s elevation of solitude as a virtue finds some agreement in Plato. In Book VI of the Republic (496a) Sokrates mentions five ways a man growing up in a bad city — all extant cities are bad — might become a philosopher. The five are: 1) if a noble and well-reared nature is held in check by exile; 2) if a big soul grows up in a small village; 3) for the very few, if a man has an art and despises it from good nature; 4) or if he is sick, like Theages; 5) or if he has a daimonion, the case of Sokrates. Now Nietzsche had an art, philology, and out of good nature despised it; he grew up a big-hearted soul in small towns and an ever smaller home; he was also noble and yet in a sense exiled, first from Germany, then from Academe; and it may be that Zarathustra was his daimonion. However, it is the fourth way that is most pertinent, the way of Theages, the way of sickness. In Nietzsche, the decadent, it includes the rest. He could not heal others if he had not healed himself first, and he could not have done that if he had not first been sick, and yet also, as he claims, fundamentally greatly healthy.
V. Truth Discovers Nature
In order to discover the fundamental basis of the new tablet of virtues Nietzsche teaches in Ecce Homo, we must turn to Part Four. In Part One, Nietzsche began by saying he was fated to be both decadent and healthy; in Part Two, on sagacity, he spoke of an organizing idea, which keeps one from knowing oneself until one knows it, even as it orders everything to itself, and at the end he declared his formula for greatness is to love one’s fate. Now in Part Four, “Why I Am a Destiny” Nietzsche begins with the important declaration, which we have been waiting for: “I know my fate.” The “organizing idea” that drove young Nietzsche on his way was truth; his torment was the question: What is the relation of truth and life; and eventually his task was to be the Revaluation of All Values. This was his fate; it was what he loved and had to love; and it is his destiny.
Naturally we wonder about the basis of this task. We wonder whether truth and life can be reconciled. In Part Four, especially in section 7, the theme of the whole work, and of Nietzsche’s work, is given its polemical summation. Nietzsche makes spiritual war against all anti-nature teachings, especially those of the priest and the Christianity that had ruled the world since antiquity. Even on a first reading, such a polemical summation may also reveal the non-polemical theme of the work. That theme is nature; the “what one is” that one is called to discover and become must be fundamental, already extant, natural, and that such a man as Nietzsche actually achieves. Nature is the both will-to-power willing the wave, and the the Nietzsche who celebrates the wave, the lover of wave and will.[xxi] fusis loves Geist, and Geist loves fusis.[xxii] In Nature truth and life find their source. Nietzsche says that all he says here has been said in Zarathustra. That is largely true,[xxiii] but the proportion between theme and polemical summation is the opposite in that pacific work, which ends with a festival, not a war. Moreover, while Ecce Homo points above itself, to Zarathustra, Zarathustra does not point above itself, except to the Eternity that Zarathustra weds at the end of Part Three.[xxiv]
VI. How One Reads Great Books
However, all that Nietzsche has to tell us about how to lead our lives, what the virtues are, who he is, and why we should obey him as a Destiny, depends decisively on his authority. Why should we trust him? Certainly there is no reason to trust him without coming to know him, and since he is dead, we can only come to know him through his books. Nietzsche knew this and that is one reason why he has so much to say about reading. He also knew, from experience, that reading was a dying art, and he feared, with foresight, that it would soon die. Judging from the reading Ecce Homo has received, especially recently, one cannot say his fears were excessive.
Knowing the decline of reading, Nietzsche gives us guidance. Of course like all great writers, he gives us instruction in good reading primarily by writing well. The more you appreciate his writing, the better you already are reading better. In addition, in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche points to the good writing in his books, criticizes some of their stylistic weaknesses, and through both teaches us what to look for in reading, above all what to enjoy.[xxv] This is not all.
Few thinkers of the first order have much at all to say about reading or writing. Reading Hume and reading Rousseau were important to Kant, but he gives us no readings of them and no reflections on reading. Aquinas and Heidegger give us abundant examples and bright models, but say little. Nietzsche does both. So do Maimonides and Schopenhauer, though they say less. Only Plato says as much as Nietzsche, though less explicitly, and implicitly in his presentation of eros. The virtues required of those who read the only books worth reading — books that demand we read them slowly and even invite us to learn them by heart — have never been better described than by Nietzsche in Ecce Homo:
Wenn ich mir das Bild eines vollkommnen Lesers ausdenke, so wird immer ein Untier von Mut und Neugierde daraus, außerdem noch etwas Biegsames, Listiges, Vorsichtiges, ein geborner Abenteurer und Entdecker. Zuletzt: ich wüßte es nicht besser zu sagen, zu wem ich im Grunde allein rede, als es Zarathustra gesagt hat: w e m allein will er sein Räthsel erzählen?
Euch, den kühnen Suchern, Versuchern, und wer je sich mit listigen Segeln auf furchtbare Meere einschiffte,—
euch, den Räthsel-Trunkenen, den Zwielicht-Frohen, deren Seele mit Flöten zu jedem Irrschlunde gelockt wird: —
denn nicht wollt ihr mit feiger Hand einem faden nachtasten; und wo ihr e r r a t e n könnt, da hasst ihr es, zu e r s c h l i e ß e n . . .
When I imagine a perfect reader, he always turns into a monster of courage and curiosity; moreover, supple, cunning, cautions; a born adventurer and discoverer. In the end, I could not say better to whom alone I am speaking at bottom than Zarathustra said it: to whom alone will he relate his riddle?
“To you, the bold searchers, researchers, and whoever embarks
with cunning sails on terrible seas —
to you, drunk with riddles, glad of the twilight, whose soul flutes lure astray to every whirlpool,
because you do not want to grope along a thread with cowardly
hand; and where you can guess, you hate to deduce.”
It is as such a monster of curiosity and guessing, of pride and solitude, that Nietzsche himself reads his own books in “Why I Write Such Good Books.” It is also as a sufferer that Nietzsche reads. Over his own books, as over Shakespeare, he sobs. And not because he has guessed wrong, no, because he guesses right. Reading was no duty, no profession, and no diversion for Nietzsche. Being the first reader to meet his own demands is not the least way he teaches us what it means to read him.
Ecce Homo guides the reader as yet unacquainted with Nietzsche’s works in another way: by already before the fact attacking various misinterpretations Nietzsche expected to be foisted upon him. By “friends” and by enemies. Nietzsche may be known by his friends, if he has any, but perhaps better known by his enemies. To those who would wish to call him “holy,” who would, for example, acknowledge the death of God and still call themselves Christian theologians, he declares himself to be an Antichrist. For those who would claim him as a fellow Jew-hater, he plainly expresses his contempt. To those who would enlist him in a war of the then current German Reich to dominate Europe, he makes plain his championship of the French. (And anyone who tries to enlist him in favor of a bellicose, nationalist, Socialist Germany, headed by a Jew-hater like Hitler, is, therefore, a fourfold mis-reader of Ecce Homo.) The debasing misinterpretations of such movements as Marxism or Freudianism, Nietzsche treats with high-peak silence. From Nietzsche’s point of view the two are much the same — their ideal for man is to live warm in body and adjusted in soul, without suffering, courage, wisdom, or joy. Lest, however, various rebellious spirits, also scornful of mediocrity, have an excuse for claiming Nietzsche as their co-belligerent, and thus his friend, Nietzsche scorns their indignation, describes the kind of gracious human being he admires and thus challenges them by asking if they are up to it. Nietzsche is to be known by what he sought in a reader, more than the multitude after him who felt qualified to praise him, claim to understand him, and support what they thought he teaches, and considering that, it may be that he may be best known by his enemies, more exactly by the very few who are adversaries, and on his own level.
Ecce Homo offers such a noble reader guidance. In it Nietzsche treats his works roughly in the order of their publication; indeed “Why I Write Such Good Books” is the only part of Ecce Homo to be arranged chronologically. This procedure not only justifies reading them in such an order, as stages on a journey, episodes in an adventure, and steps toward a goal, but indicates that they tell the story of Nietzsche’s life. If Ecce Homo tells how, in the words of its subtitle, Nietzsche became or becomes what he is, then Nietzsche became what he was in the course of writing the sequence of books that he comments on in “Why I Write Such Good Books.” (So, in reading those books, thoroughly immersing yourself in them, might you arrive where he did?) Here again Zarathustra is decisive; its writing or its inspiration made Nietzsche what he only dimly was in the works that precede it and deliberately refrained from seeming to be in those that followed.[xxvi] One way then that Ecce Homo tells us we might proceed to read more Nietzsche would be to start with Birth of Tragedy and the four Untimelys and proceed chronologically, or perhaps start with Frolicsome Science, the work at the end of whose first edition Zarathustra first appears, and see what it was like for Nietzsche to discover Zarathustra. Maybe his path should be our path.
Ecce Homo certainly indicates the canon of Nietzsche’s works. Clearly the peak is Thus Spake Zarathustra and the peak of the peak is its disclosure of the challenging and blessing thought of the eternal return of the same or, as he also calls it, amor fati. All the other works lie like foothills below Zarathustra. We are to read and interpret them in the light of Zarathustra or on the way to reaching it, which does not mean treating these easier prose works as a key to Zarathustra. Just the opposite. What appears easier, simpler, more palatable in them is ultimately to be put aside in favor of the inhospitable altitude of Zarathustra, however cold, and thin, or hot and untouchable, it might prove for human, all too human, lungs and hands. According to the prose of Ecce Homo, the poetry of Zarathustra is higher than any prose Nietzsche wrote.
Accordingly, supposing then that one is convinced by Ecce Homo that one should read more, perhaps one should proceed straight to Zarathustra. Nor does Ecce Homo leave us without guidance in reading Zarathustra. Of the eight sections Nietzsche devotes to Zarathustra, the first four tell the history of its writing; the fifth tells the consequences and the last three speak of the work itself. From this history we learn that Zarathustra was a work of inspiration and revelation. Though there is no God, there is revelation. Throughout his excited and happy retelling of how Zarathustra came, as happy and breathless as Pheidippides from Marathon, Nietzsche stresses the extraordinary character of the experience of inspiration, something unheard of in the nineteenth century, and fundamentally unknown in any. Throughout, Zarathustra is represented as a real being who visited Nietzsche and Zarathustra as something given and imposed upon Nietzsche, something he may have desired and courted but did not make or create. The unmade otherness of Zarathustra and the given rather than invented character of Zarathustra permit Nietzsche to praise Zarathustra and Zarathustra without offense; yet what are we to make of the fact that throughout Nietzsche also speaks of Zarathustra as his possession, one that he not only found but invented? What would otherwise be confusion or nonsense or fatal contradiction seems to be offered us as a mark of the exaltation of Zarathustra and of Zarathustra, whose coming cannot, it seems, be described without falling into contradiction. Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s best book, he wrote it, but it was also the gift of Zarathustra, whose inspiration Nietzsche could not refuse. Sometimes then Nietzsche treats Zarathustra as if he is its father, sometimes he treats Zarathustra as if he is its mother, as for example in the prankish assertion that the eighteen months between August 1881 and February 1883, between the conception of the “eternal return” and the birth of Zarathustra I, make Nietzsche a female elephant.[xxvii] Other times, Nietzsche seems to be the son of Zarathustra.
Is Nietzsche the creative contemplator he describes in The Frolicsome Science No. 301, who does not know he creates, or is there genuine revelation and Zarathustra the highest example of it? Here in Ecce Homo he claims the latter. It seems that his sense of owning Zarathustra is not a claim to have created Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s pride is then like the pride of a youngster who has received a wonderful gift. He feels delighted by it, singled out by it, as if it were made for him only, made to help him become what he always wanted to be, and thus he cannot feel he made it. Nietzsche’s gratitude presupposes that he did not make the gift of Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s claim to have invented and written it merely does justice to the exertion and labor it takes to receive such a revelation. Unless, of course, Nietzsche’s understanding of creation embraces these opposites by regarding spontaneous otherness as the mark of a created thing. It is when your creature overtakes you with a sudden gift of its own that you know yourself to be a creator. It is when a child gives his parents a gift they would not have given themselves, or even perhaps thought to, although it fits their desire or aspiration exactly, that the parents most nearly understand procreation.
Be that as it may, there is a third thing we need to know about Zarathustra before we read it. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche never mentions Part IV.[xxviii] Zarathustra III brings Zarathustra to a close. Zarathustra I, II, and III is a whole. Is Part IV, which was only sent to seven friends (or should we call them “higher men”?), not, according to Nietzsche, a part of Also sprach Zarathustra? Is it not even among the books that make Nietzsche such a “good writer”? Is this a blushing denial of his work, or merely a reticence? Is even this most intimate and publicizing of Nietzsche’s works, nonetheless, reticent? To know, one would have to read Zarathustra.
Even as a preface to Nietzsche’s works, Ecce Homo poses a moral challenge to the reader. By exhibiting his joyful love of his fate so wittily, so lightly, so abundantly, Nietzsche challenges those approaching or passing forty-four to examine their own lives or what is left of them — can you love your life as I do? Can you affirm everything small, wasted, lost, pained, and foolish in it? Is there enough good in your life so that you can bless the whole of it? And to those far from forty-four his self-beholding and self-loving portrait warns — have you acted so that at forty-four you can love and bless as I do? Yet these questions are not sufficiently precise. Each reader must think of himself, review his own life, in minute detail, and judge it. Despite or rather because of its witty exuberance Ecce Homo can make a reader pensive and solitary; it is punctuated with “one minute silences” for the reader. Suddenly you face a thought, yourself, your life. Ecce Homo is like a demon perching on your bed at night asking —“Could you bear to repeat this, this day, this week, this life?”[xxix] If we find our life wanting, we will find Ecce Homo unbearable and its author insufferably happy or, rather, “proud, selfish, and wicked,” as we like to say of those who offend our self-esteem. By exhibiting his life, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo is a fitting introduction to Zarathustra; in Nietzsche’s affirmation of his own life, we already begin to meet with Zarathustra’s most abysmal and most joyous thought, of the eternal return of the same.
What if we don’t feel up to the challenge and yet still want to spend time with Nietzsche? Nietzsche knew we might feel inadequate, especially if we are young, aspiring and consequently terribly ashamed, like the youth in Zarathustra I.8: “Tree on the Mountainside,” or such as he describes in Beyond Good and Evil No. 31, and as he explains in Ecce Homo, that is precisely why he wrote Beyond Good and Evil, to help us up to himself, to free us from philosophy so far, from Christianity, and from all forms of modernity, and then maybe some of us will be among the “philosophers of the future” and then, soon after, Nietzsche realized Beyond Good and Evil needed more such support, by exposing, more authoritative falsehoods, and sweeping away the kinds of false lives built upon them, but just as Beyond Good and Evil ends with an ascent to Zarathustra, so On a Genealogy of Morals says ‘seek higher,’ for one of its chapters is an exposition of a single passage in Zarathustra. In truth, the “Zur” in its title means “toward” more than “on.”
By writing all his books Nietzsche also warns against a most powerful misinterpretation of his work, even though he could not have foreseen it exactly. And by writing a book, Ecce Homo, in which he also describes what a book is warns even more. Nevertheless, almost from the beginning of his reception, what Nietzsche did not publish, did not perfect into the beauty of a book, made his reputation as much as what he did. At first and for many years, a book fashioned from his Nachlass (leftovers) by his sister, entitled ‘Will-to-power’ and authorized only by her,[xxx] shaped Nietzsche’s image. Yet even after its authority was demolished, and her many suppressions and forgeries exposed, this Will-to-Power went on distorting Nietzsche. Even Heidegger’s great confrontation with Nietzsche is rendered Quixotic by his credulity in this ghost; Heidegger’s will-to-overcome required a Nietzsche he could lance, “Caught you, you resenter, you last metaphysician.”[xxxi] Lesser minds fare worse. In the Anglo-Saxon countries many interpreters of Nietzsche pay more attention to his leftovers than to his books or view his books in the light of his leftovers.[xxxii] Reading Nietzsche this way is like reading Shakespeare with the names of the speakers cut, the pages shuffled, and the damage suppressed. Many in addition pay more attention to what someone lesser thought rather than Nietzsche.[xxxiii] Their current leader is the playful, turgid, joyless ‘68 Communard, Jacques Derrida, whose philosophy for the Last Man appeals to many Last Scholars.[xxxiv] No one who does not himself write well can possibly understand such a man as Nietzsche who wrote better than well. Among the books one must ignore to do these things, none is more instructive than Ecce Homo, for it nowhere authorizes the reader to pay any attention to what Nietzsche did not publish. Part Three is not entitled “Why I write such good Nachlass.” On the contrary, it pleads, “Read my great books.”[xxxv]
VII. Ecce Homo as Epilogue — Nietzsche’s Joy
For those who have read all of Nietzsche’s books, studied them, and lived with them, especially Zarathustra, Ecce Homo is an epilogue. While reading Zarathustra, we see this man Zarathustra live with one thought and one thought only; we witness him announce it, evade it, face it, struggle with it, and finally embrace it in solitary dialogue and solitary song. But Zarathustra is a poem, and if we read it seriously, if we read it with its one thought in mind, we must wonder if any real human being could embrace what Zarathustra finally does. Can a human being embrace the thought of eternal return of the same? To be sure, that is one of Nietzsche’s and Zarathustra’s points; man so far has not even faced this challenging thought and only some being more than man, namely the Übermensch, could. Nevertheless, we wonder. In Zarathustra II Zarathustra himself accuses the poets of lying too much and then admits to being a poet. Perhaps there is too much lying in Zarathustra. To this suspicion Zarathustra or Nietzsche might well reply with a smile: “Yes, noble lying.” Indeed, by asking whether such an embrace of fate as Zarathustra makes is possible for a man, we are already coming under the ennobling or crushing spell of the question of eternal return. We are already measuring Nietzsche by the Nietzschean measure of measures. Thus we may no longer be asking “Is it possible” in a disinterested or hypothetical spirit, but in a personal spirit (even if we are not yet asking it by risking our lives).
So engaged by Nietzsche’s question, it is natural for us to try to answer it by looking for someone who has tried. And if the author of Zarathustra has tried, that would give authority to his poetic representation of Zarathustra trying to. Indeed, it would be extraordinary if, having written Zarathustra, the drama of a man who first evades, then struggles with, and finally embraces the idea of the eternal return of the same, Nietzsche did not feel called to examine his own life from this point of view. Indeed, in the leftovers of the Zarathustra years, after a six-point sketch on the Übermensch, the following solitary remark appears:
Ich will das leben nich wieder. Wie habe ich’s ertragen? Schaffend. Was macht mich den Anblick aushalten? Der Blick auf den Übermenschen, der das Leben bejaht. Ich habe versucht, es selber zu bejahen — Ach![xxxvi]
I do not want life again. How have I borne it? By creating. What has made me endure? The vision of the Surpassing Man who affirms life. I have tried to affirm life myself — but ah!
After Zarathustra Nietzsche wrote several prose books, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil) is the best example, that aim to lead the contemporary reader away from various errors, whose history Nietzsche recounts, towards Zarathustra. In these books Nietzsche teaches those who are somewhat discontented with modernity to become more so, partly by making them realize how inedible its meals are, and partly by feeding them something better: antipasto di Zarathustra. In none of these books does Nietzsche himself face the idea of eternal recurrence. Meanwhile, he also worked on a project sometimes entitled “Will to Power,” which he thought of as either a philosophic expression of the insights of Zarathustra and perhaps a perfection of it. Both what Nietzsche wrote after Zarathustra and what he planned must be scrutinized from the point of view of Zarathustra IV where Zarathustra overcomes the temptation to teach the discontented, but unliberated higher men. In what he published Nietzsche does not, it seems to me, give in to this temptation, for the reader is never handed the idea of the eternal return; instead, he is set on an arduous and risky path towards it. However, had Nietzsche expressed Zarathustra in a treatise it would certainly have been yielding to this temptation. And it would also have been a colossal evasion of the spiritual necessity of facing the idea of eternal return personally — in one’s own life and vulnerable existence. For the author of Zarathustra to have published or written a treatise entitled “Will to Power” would have been a base stooping, a betrayal of one’s own best hour, a forgetting of who one is, and even a becoming of what one is not. And for the author of Zarathustra not to have written Ecce Homo would have been spiritual cowardice. In August of 1881 Nietzsche discovered an idea, for the rest of his life it discovered him. Up until he wrote Ecce Homo, he wondered if he had been bitten by more than he could chew.
If so, then one cannot agree with Martin Heidegger, whose interpretation of Nietzsche is most serious, though less searching. Because life and work were so nearly seamless for Nietzsche, Heidegger is justified in attending so carefully and thoughtfully to the leftovers and letters. Nevertheless, from Nietzsche’s point of view, Heidegger is not right when he misses the significance of Zarathustra IV for its author and when he ignores Ecce Homo almost entirely. Nietzsche chose not to write a philosophic treatise; the part of the “Transvaluation” he did write, Der Antichrist, is a declaration of war on Christianity, not a treatise. Heidegger regards Nietzsche’s not doing so as a “failure,” thinks he knows the metaphysical reasons, and sets out to finish what Nietzsche “could not.” One wonders if Heidegger’s failure to see that he disagrees with Nietzsche does not rest upon his failure to appreciate the ethical significance eternal return had from first to last for Nietzsche.
How then did Nietzsche face his life? Nietzsche began Ecce Homo on October 15, 1888, his forty-fourth birthday. Most birthday celebrations hail the birth of an individual in the light of an uncritical appreciation of all the days of his life since the day of his birth. On our birthdays we feel we deserve a treat, of regarding ourselves without criticism, for example. At the party we indulge ourselves in the sweets that quotidian guilt or good sense would forbid. Instead, Nietzsche celebrated his birthday by launching a risky examination of his life and work, every morning, every page; every headache, every thought; every meal, every consequence; every evening and every solitude, all measured by the questions: Would you like these once more? After about twenty days, it was finished. That he undertook it shows he was no spiritual coward; that he had the courage to is almost victory itself. To know for sure, we must examine Ecce Homo itself. Does it include such a confrontation? Has Nietzsche faced his Devil?
Nietzsche says “once more” to his life, first of all by saying “once more” to his body. Despite the sicknesses that he mentions, life has been great — not good, but great. Nietzsche has enjoyed great health, though not good health. Indeed, he could not, he affirms, have enjoyed great health without having bad health. It is as his own best physician that he is responsible for such health, and in Ecce Homo he celebrates the doctor more than the patient. Illness is affirmed for the sake of the great health that is required to overcome it. Thus Nietzsche affirms himself as willful physician, not an instance of good fusis. During his life he said “I will be healthy”; now he celebrates his will’s victory. (As we shall see “great health” means the state of receptivity to Zarathustra; in Ecce Homo all roads of affirmation lead to Zarathustra.)
Nietzsche also says “once more” to his life by the disposition he takes to other human beings (or would he like us to say “towards human beings”?). Toward his parents, gratitude: towards his friends and enemies, praise for their virtues; and toward those he may have disappointedly loved, a gracious silence. About his parents he says the best that can be said without flattering. Being the son of his father meant growing up fatherless in a parson’s house, but this grown atheist does not complain. Remarks on the “idealism” of Naumburg cuisine are the closest Nietzsche comes to criticizing his mother (pretty close, I admit). Upon the accidents of climate, early education, and ancestry, Nietzsche looks cheerfully. What did not destroy one made one stronger. Meeting Wagner is treated as a great plus, even if his works are criticized, and Nietzsche’s tremendous praise of Zarathustra does not make him blind to the merit of Peter Gast’s music. Gay and savoring, Nietzsche looks out to dead friends such as Pascal, Stendhal, and Montaigne. About whatever disappointment he felt over Lou von Salomé, Nietzsche is politely silent. Between the coming of the eternal return in August ’81 and the birth of Zarathustra I in February ’83, Lou appears only as the true author of the noble “Hymn to Life.” The same graciousness and veiled affection is observed toward Cosima Wagner (Ariadne).
There is, however, one silence in Ecce Homo that is not so gracious. After sickness forced Nietzsche, not entirely reluctantly, to stop teaching at Basel, he lived on a pension from the University. He was on semi-permanent sabbatical. While not lavish, this pension allowed Nietzsche to range about Europe at leisure, and carefulness with it allowed him to partially finance the publication of his books (gifts from friends did the rest). It was Franz Overbeck who protected and maintained this pension. That none of this is mentioned — I do not mean proclaimed but courteously alluded to — in Ecce Homo seems dishonest, to the reader and perhaps also to himself. In a note intended for Ecce Homo, Nietzsche says Overbeck’s good will toward him was really a means to poison him with self-doubt and calls Overbeck “canaille.”[xxxvii] Perhaps there is some truth in this criticism: old friends who follow differing ways of life may find later meetings make them feel uneasy about the path they’ve chosen. Nietzsche was more gracious when Overbeck came to Turin to care for him; he embraced him warmly. Later Overbeck wondered if Nietzsche should not be shot; can one call a witless Nietzsche Nietzsche? “Yes, die at the right time,” the witty Nietzsche might have agreed. Overbeck is also to be praised for never turning over his correspondence to Elizabeth Nietzsche. Because of his loyalty and suspicion, her program of misrepresentation could never entirely prevail, or forever. Of friend Overbeck, Nietzsche does not say enough. Like living on a pension, dishonesty endangers one, by making one’s life potentially weightless. Though no man deserved a pension more, perhaps even Nietzsche would have been better and deeper than he was if he had had to earn a living, say as a plumber. Certain it is that acknowledging this pension would have accorded better with honesty and graciousness.[xxxviii]
It is true that these silences are only objectionable if there is truth and we are meant to abide by it. From time to time, Nietzsche asked whether we should pursue truth, and if we find it, follow its maxims, obey its commands, and he even seems sometimes to question whether there is truth. I say ‘seems’ because he knew the proof “there is no truth” is not only self-contradictory, but that it would require a complete investigation of the whole, which he certainly knew he had not conducted. Moreover, Nietzsche esteemed the virtue of honestly. Can you have honesty without truth? Not for long, and, I think, Nietzsche knew it all along. In the name of Redlichkeit, Nietzsche often objected to “Die wahre Welt,” but he could not escape the truth that Redlichkeit braucht Wahrheit.[xxxix]
Another silence is ambiguous. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche has little to say about his mother and nothing to say about his sister. Apparently, this was deliberate, for in late December of ‘88, Nietzsche mailed a revision of “Wise” 3, to his publisher, and in it he says the most profound objection to his most abysmal thought, the eternal return, has always been his mother and sister.[xl] It seems to me that the silence in which he had, previous to this revision, left mother and sister, was superior. That silence is conspicuous enough, especially in contrast to the praise of his father. What of Nietzsche’s double nature, as decadent and beginner? What does he owe to each parent? Is Nietzsche a decadent from his ghostly father and a beginner from his mother? Or, more likely, a decadent up ‘til his thirty-sixth year like his father and then by surviving that nadir year, a great beginner. Then it was that in his thinking and in his good books he really became “untimely,” “ghostly,” hyperborean, halcyon, dividing time, and for all times. Read closely, Nietzsche’s account suggests he is only descended from his father and Elizabeth only descended from mother. The two versions are not as different as it first seems, and the first is noble in its silence. Still, considering what sister Elizabeth did to him later, by publishing a Will-to-Power ‘book’ from his Nachlass (leftovers), one wishes he had said something to forever keep her distant and arm his friends against her. Of course, writing a will and appointing a literary executor would have done the same, but I suppose the illusions of divinity that characterized Nietzsche’s madness were not likely to have been preceded by so mortal a thought.
The fact that Nietzsche places such an emphasis on cuisine in his account of his wisdom draws attention, for those who agree with him, to something lacking in Ecce Homo, and in his work. There is not one good recipe in the whole of it. If Nietzsche had written a utopia or described an Eden, he would, according to the taste he espouses, have had to honor great chefs with busts; certainly the ice cream Nietzsche loved would have compelled him to honor the unknown discoverer of it with a Tomb of the Unknown Chef. Considering the relation between food and self-love, which Nietzsche tacitly acknowledges, we must agreed with M. F. K. Fisher that one of the greatest tests of self-love is whether you can prepare a good five course dinner for yourself to eat alone. A bachelor such as Nietzsche ought to know how difficult that is. Yet, although Nietzsche says cuisine is important and recommends Piedmontese, he says no more. From the reports of visitors, such as Helen Zimmern, old friends such as Deussen and landlords such as Durrish, we doubt Nietzsche could have cooked himself a meal fit for a guest. The feast in Zarathustra IV is unspecified, probably a little honey from a pot and thigh of lamb roasted over a fire, neither requiring much preparation. No viand, sauce, or sweetie is named after Nietzsche. Celebration of the victory that turned back the Turks at the walls of Vienna gave us the Sacher Torte.[xli] Neither Nietzsche’s discovery of eternal return, Zarathustra’s meeting it successfully, nor Nietzsche’s doing the same, has given us the Nietzsche Torte. Nietzsche liked good food, he lauded cooking as an art, but he was no cook. For that one would have to turn to the likes of Willa Cather.[xlii]
According to Nietzsche food is no scrap on the plate of life, but it is it also not the point. He would despise the vegetarian pacifists of today and all nutritionists, anybody who talks about calories at meals and lives from meal to meal thinking of meals, tourists of life. He had a jockey’s view of food; up until the race you eat what keeps your weight down for the race; after winning, come the desserts. Food is no scrap on the plate of life, yes, but for Nietzsche books are the dessert of life and his are all sweet victories, sweet discoveries, and sweet celebrations.
To affirm his life, Nietzsche had to reread all his books. Can you bear what you wrote? Do you stand by that? No changes needed there? Nothing to wince at, excuse, or forget? Can you love your old thoughts? Can you love yourself? Wholly? In “Why I Write Such Good Books” Nietzsche answers with a series of prefaces in which he finds each book good and the whole very good. It is, however, as the author yet receiver of Zarathustra that Nietzsche faces his life and says joyously “once more” to it in Ecce Homo. Remove all reference to Zarathustra from Ecce Homo and few sections would be left undamaged; remove the eight sections on Zarathustra and the book’s heart would beat no longer; without Zarathustra Nietzsche could not have affirmed his life.
Yet the affirmation of life that Nietzsche as the author/receiver of Zarathustra makes in Ecce Homo differs from Zarathustra’s own affirmation. Both say “once more” to their lives, but as their lives differ, so do their affirmations. For one thing, Zarathustra is not an author, either mundane or inspired. He writes nothing and publishes nothing; to the public; he makes only speeches, fewer and fewer of them. Moreover, nothing except the abysmal thought of eternal return ever overtakes Zarathustra. There is no Zarathustra above Zarathustra; no place like Sils Maria, or Nizza or Aquila where he might go to await a visitation; to court his highest joy he has only to return home. After he left the University, Nietzsche went the opposite way; in Ecce Homo he sought a public. In Zarathustra IV Zarathustra refuses to teach higher men who seek him in distress. Zarathustra resists the temptation to pity them; he is courteous enough to give them a party, but prefers the solitary air outside his cave. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche addresses the same multitude in the city of the Motley Cow that Zarathustra learns to shun in Zarathustra I. In his writings after Zarathustra Nietzsche carries on skirmishes (Götzen-Dämmerung) and small wars (Zur Genealogie der Moral; and just before Ecce Homo he declares a big war (Der Antichrist). By comparison Zarathustra is almost a pacifist. Though he praises warriors (Zarathustra I, 10) and criticizes priests, he declares no war. Proper names are almost absent from Zarathustra; the Tarantula may be Rousseau (II, 7); Wagner may be alluded to (Zarathustra IV, 5); only Christ is unmistakenly referred to, though not by name. Zarathustra differs from Christ, but not by being a Caesar. Zarathustra does not rule; Nietzsche in Ecce Homo declares himself ready to. In Zarathustra we hear that, contra Plato and Christ, the best want to rule; we hear Zarathustra criticized for not wanting to rule; but at the end of Zarathustra III Zarathustra dwells in utter solitude. In Zarathustra IV Zarathustra is interested in who the Lords of the Earth shall be, but he himself dwells in his own mountain kingdom, without subjects or citizens, with just a talking eagle and a talking snake. The appearance of the birds and the affectionate lion at the end portend the nearness of Zarathustra’s children, and perhaps the approach of his own free “going under” or death. Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo was a part of a campaign of self-presentation to the European public; as such it was also a bid for rulership: “I am ready to rule Europe.”
Both Zarathustra’s solitary “Seven Seals” and Nietzsche’s forty-fourth birthday celebration, Ecce Homo, are preparations for death: Was that my life, then “once more.” Both are prepared to leave life, but while Zarathustra stays around for the sake of his children, Nietzsche stays around for the sake of making himself public, waging war in various revaluations, and subsequent rule. Alas, Nietzsche stayed around for less than two months, but in his late autumn letters Nietzsche looks forward to an active spring, indeed a spring offensive; whatever Nietzsche’s earlier plans for “A Revaluation of All Values” were, the first of them, Der Antichrist, makes it clear that these are to be polemics, though with hearts of gold, like the middle of Der Antichrist; they were armies engaged in a war, which he thought would lead to rule; hence, the concluding section of Ecce Homo is entitled “Why I Am a Destiny.” Nietzsche’s speaking truth and loosing arrows will usher in a time of great wars and great politics. It is as a spiritual warrior that Nietzsche is a destiny dividing history into a before and after, a B. N. and A. N. Only in his mad, though witty, postcards did Nietzsche coarsen his claim to spiritual rulership with the delusion that he had the power to make men obey orders. In Ecce Homo he is still a teacher who respects the independent will of his students, knowing that all nobility is solitary. Coerced virtue is not virtue. (Though it might be a good habit: “Eat your spinach.”) So while Ecce Homo has moments of strong advice, it issues no orders. No one is shot.[xliii]
VIII. Joy and War
The solitary redemptive affirmation of Zarathustra is followed by no going down to men as teacher, let alone as ruler, and no offering of himself in these roles so that he might be slain, whereas Nietzsche‘s solitary redemptive affirmation is followed by an immediate going down to men as teacher and spiritual ruler. This difference is puzzling. It seems to put Nietzsche in a bad light. He seems so inferior, in solitude, self-mastery, repose and joy to Zarathustra.[xliv] If it is your joy to look at life and the whole of life and affirm it with “once more,” why set about changing that whole by teaching or ruling? And, granted that it is desirable to face one’s life at forty-four, need one publish the record of the event? Indeed why undertake it with the intention of publishing? Zarathustra never repeats the “Seven Seals” to another soul, why repeat your self-affirmation, your amor fati in public as Ecce Homo? Why, dear Nietzsche, do you expose yourself to the rabble? These innocent observations and prosecuting questions would convict Nietzsche of degrading and betraying his nobility if it were not for one consideration.
The peace of amor fati is not necessarily contradicted by the war of publication if the war is for the sake of peace, to protect it or secure it. If you love your life and life itself well enough to say “once more” to it, you not only will eternity but by so doing declare yourself in favor of life for others who will live after you, including your children. Now if you affirm this, do you not want to defend life from everything that injures and slanders it? Will you not, then, be willing to make war on all teachings that make war on life? Will you not want to attack the attackers of life? Nietzsche found that the foothills he had thrown up to help men up to Zarathustra were not enough. War on the plains was also needed. Ecce Homo was the first clash and Der Antichrist the second; he planned more such “revaluations” for the spring. None of this is pitying or teaching the higher men; to fight such a spiritual war you need not expose your innermost high thought.
Nor do we have any reason to claim that such a thought as corresponds to Zarathustra’s “Seven Seals” with its courting of Woman Eternity is revealed in Ecce Homo; a mad January postcard, not Ecce Homo itself, is the only way we now think we know who Ariadne was. The premise of Ecce Homo is that the peace of amor fati and the war of publication are not only compatible but, in the case of a war to secure the possibility of amor fati for others living and yet to live, are required by each other. He who says “once more” to life loves Eternity and for the sake of the children arising from his union with her will go to war against whatever teaching hinders his children from one day standing on the peak of themselves and rejoicing “once more.” To subdue in yourself the spirit of revenge without then fighting a public war against it is, according to Nietzsche, to be a mere Christ; to fight a public war against a sect that spreads this spirit without first having subdued it in yourself is to be a mere Caesar. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche tried to be a Christ who lived on after his redemption to become a Caesar ready to fight a war for the earth and perish in it for the children of the earth.
The fact that Nietzsche was not able to carry on this spiritual war beyond January 1889, when he collapsed and disappeared in a cloud of witty-mad postcards, may not render his premise questionable. In writing Ecce Homo he prepared to perish. When else does it make sense to review your life, asking “Do I want it once more?” except when you are about to die or enter some perilous battle? Two months into his war Nietzsche fell grievously wounded. The fact that he fell just around Christ’s birthday,[xlv] that he embraced a flogged horse, and then played Wagner for hours suggests that the “enemy” took him prisoner before it slowly annihilated him over the next decade. Excessive pity (for the horse, for a higher beast) as well as delusions of omni-personhood destroyed his loyalty to himself . . . to Nietzsche.
What sort of madness did Nietzsche suffer from? Was it physical? Was it mental? Or something else? Soon after his breakdown in January of ‘89, two persons who knew him very well, Peter Gast and Franz Overbeck, and later Count Harry Kessler in 1895, thought that Nietzsche was faking madness. Certainly Nietzsche has much to say about madness in his works, and he even praises it, for example in Dawn, 14.[xlvi] Moreover, it is to a Madman that he gives the first announcement of the “death of God” (Frolicsome Science, 125). Why might Nietzsche himself fake madness? If a Madman says something fundamentally outrageous to a community, well, he’s just a madman; by laughing at him, even licensing him as a Fool, or locking him up, the community can ignore his thought and dismiss his person. Did Nietzsche fake madness to protect himself from the revulsion his views, especially in The Antichrist, were likely to provoke, the revilement he was likely to receive, and perhaps also the loss of his pension? If he did, he overshot the mark, for as a result of his madness, faked or not, Sister Elizabeth got to suppress such writings as The Antichrist and Ecce Homo for a long while; she got to distort his leftover thoughts into Will-to-Power for even longer; and mad Nietzsche couldn’t utter a word, or lift a finger, or write a line.
I can imagine an experience that would make all one’s writings no more than straw, such that one fell silent unto death. I can imagine it with difficulty, but I can do so because Thomas Aquinas is reported to have had just such an experience. Not Nietzsche. And especially not the Nietzsche who had just written Ecce Homo about his writings and was all that fall, even into early January, much concerned with its publication. However, it seems to me not impossible that Nietzsche might come to think that only a complete indifference to publication accorded with the redeeming self-love he had achieved in Ecce Homo. After all, that is what Nietzsche’s Zarathustra thinks. With the publication of his redeeming self-love Zarathustra is so little concerned that he does not write at all. Did Nietzsche choose madness as a way of emulating his self-loving Zarathustra?
Another virtue, the twin of self-love, that Nietzsche often praises is solitude; in Beyond Good and Evil 284, he makes it the replacement for moderation in the Platonic quartet of the virtues; and his abiding praise of Pascal is in the name of solitude. Nietzsche was mightily attracted to virtue, pure virtue. Perhaps he was attracted by this one. What could put one in a more solitary state than to go mad — or pretend to? So, maybe Nietzsche was pretending. One cannot, I think, dispel the suspicion that Nietzsche was faking. One must observe, however, that pretending to be mad might lead to madness. When your roommate says, “For the next few weeks, I’m going to pretend to be man” it would not be unwise to watch him carefully. Horatio should have watched antic Hamlet more carefully. Then again, pretending to be mad might be a very profound sign of it.
Solitude is dangerous. As Nietzsche says whatever you take into solitude grows mightily in that rare atmosphere, like a plant in a hot house. Aristotle says, not accidentally in Book I of the Politics, that he who lives outside the polis must be either a beast or a god, for that man is political and rational go together; it is hard to have the one without the other. In the fall of 1888, in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche adds, “Leaving out a third case: one must be both — a philosopher.” True (and considering the end of the Ethics, where he urges us to become divine, a true reading of Aristotle) but by the time Nietzsche was signing postcards in the name of a god and then God, he would soon become a very dumb beast. There is a difference between being so reasonable that you have very few human beings to talk to and being so unreasonable that you cannot speak like one. Suffice it to say that the difference between Nietzsche writing and thinking and Nietzsche moaning and screaming, whether he was pretending or not, or got into true madness through feigned madness, is one of the most vivid instances of the difference between mind and mindlessness. Although he did not always praise reason, Nietzsche is one of the greatest instances of reason there could be; those who attack reason without reason or who celebrate the loss of reason might compare the state of witless confusion poor Nietzsche spent the last ten years of his life in with the ten years of thinking and writing it could have been.
Not the Nietzsche who wrote Ecce Homo, but the Nietzsche who could no longer write such a book was mad. For some, such as Strindberg, or the Elizabeth who displayed mad Nietzsche in white sheets, or lately legions of confused intellectuals, the madness of Nietzsche spreads a wonderful glow over what preceded it. All such adorers of madness should consider spending ten years as poor, mad Nietzsche did and then really find out if madness is as fun as they think. And the Deconstructionists among them, who do not like the high callings of Logos or the strict requirements that beautiful books make of readers, should not complain if they lose more reason than they have scornfully discarded or if their books are mistranslated, their views misunderstood, and pages from their wastebasket printed with their manuscript. Others, less frequent these days but still present, also see madness in the writings, but delight to cite these evidences as proof of the pernicious character of their fundamental thoughts and the character of the author formed by them. They should be asked whether catastrophe is always just. If Christians, they should be asked if the greatest failure of the greatest teacher — He offered the Kingdom and He was rejected — means He deserved what he got? Those who admire philosophers might ask themselves whether Sokrates getting hemlocked means he deserved it? Of course, these are ripostes. The proof that Nietzsche was not mad in Ecce Homo can only be established by showing the book makes sense, which is not the same as showing it is true.
By Nietzsche’s own lights Ecce Homo is a success; in it he faces his life and affirms it, every illness, every page; and in it he begins to make war on those who slander the earth; he does so by making clear the polemical side of his earlier works and by naming himself “Dionysus versus the Crucified.” Naming himself and not naming himself, for what Nietzsche says is: “Have I been understood? — Dionysus versus the Crucified.” Here he does not name himself Dionysus and in earlier saying that he is a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, he does not exclude the possibility he is also a disciple of the philosopher, or destiny, Christ. (There are even, as we mentioned earlier, reasons to think so.) If so, then he has somehow combined the wild and vengeful fury of Dionysus, the self-sacrificing destroyer of cities, with the vengeance-free redemption of Christ. Whether Nietzsche regards Christ as free of resentiment is hard to tell, even after you study Der Antichrist. How Zarathustra and how Nietzsche stand towards vengeance and resentiment is also hard. To behold Nietzsche, to understand him, to know what he was, requires study of all his books. This is the lesson of Ecce Homo that requires the reader to go beyond it.[xlvii]
Although Nietzsche claims his life is a success, nevertheless, we may well ask: Was it a success? Of systematic thinkers Nietzsche objected that they demand too much of both themselves and the whole; so far as we can now see, the whole is a deep night, perhaps deeper than thought can ever reach; he who aspires to make a system must falsify the whole and be false to himself. Is not Nietzsche in Ecce Homo open to the same objection? Does not his ideal of amor fati require too much of him? Granted that it is noble to live your life so that you can bless it as you leave it, need one bless every instant in it to bless it as a whole? Men like Nietzsche, who live solitary in the midst of beautiful projects and inventive inquiries, are tempted to think so. He who writes books, even ones made up of aphorisms, writes in the shadow of the highest book, the book which is beautiful from every angle, satisfies a thousand different criteria and is supremely neat because it has nothing accidental about it. Nietzsche claims to have written or received such a book, Zarathustra. Can a life have the same neatness? Only, I think, in the case of the life of a God who was wholly responsible for his own being. We know of such a life, or alleged life, that of Christ. And in Plato’s dialogues we see Sokrates’ life made neat. This last example is telling. Zarathustra and Nietzsche are so unlike Sokrates, who, though he towered above other men, had conversations with them. Both Zarathustra and Nietzsche keep to solitude and the solitude of speeches. They do not meet much with other human beings. Or with chance. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche denies that there are any more accidents for him. Once there were things like birth, nation, parents, upbringing and parental cuisine, but not now. His will, or his love, have turned these drossy accidents into changeless gold. As art his life has become perfect. Not to the aesthetic spectator but to the artistic inventor or maker is life justified.
Yet even for so isolated a life as Nietzsche’s, with so few friends and so few mundane difficulties, is perfect art and perfect amor fati possible? Zarathustra himself never mentions his origins or parents — was he an “author of himself?” Zarathustra doesn’t notice his animals and Nietzsche doesn’t mention his pension. Good fortune, mother, and Overbeck kept Nietzsche supplied with single rooms, railway fares, pots of honey, and ham sandwiches (his favorite). Bad fortune could have given him cholera, or crushed him in a train accident, scandal or calumny could have cost him his pension, and Lou accepting his proposal might have left him no tranquillity. To display his affirmation of his life, Nietzsche left out necessity and chance; to affirm his life he had, in this respect, to not know himself. His omission of an important material circumstance of his life and its connection to a friend might be insignificant if it were not entirely in accord with the dominant purpose of Ecce Homo. As such it reveals a great deal about his life and thought.
In Ecce Homo Nietzsche pretends to be a self, yet he should know he is a soul. What a splendid soul Nietzsche had, what delicacy, what nobility, what generosity, what strength, and what insight, yet Nietzsche did not make his soul. To be sure, his gifts would not have become his possessions, his seeds would not have bloomed and provided us with such fruits, without his deliberate, life-long, ardent, and suffering activity, but for those initial gifts, and for the gift of life, he was not responsible. That he was born a man and not an elephant was not his decision. Who decided he would have a human soul? Nature? Nature’s God. God? Who knows? It would take a very long inquiry to find out and yet one might not. One thing is sure and Nietzsche must acknowledge it: Nietzsche did not create himself. Even his body, with his small ears, however well he kept it, was something given to him, by his procreative parents and theirs, and theirs, and theirs, by viviparous Life itself. There is gratitude in what Nietzsche says about his parents in Ecce Homo, even to the point of practicing monumental history, but one wonders if it is sufficient. Moreover, one doubts he paid proper gratitude to nature. Nietzsche was anti anti-nature, no question, but not sufficiently pro nature. His many noes have a yes basis, but their number obscure it, even to him.[xlviii]
There is also something insufficient about Nietzsche’s account of sagacity. No experience in Nietzsche’s whole life required, or even encouraged him to attain sagacity (practical wisdom, prudence). He never delivered groceries, taught swimming at a summer camp, never ran a restaurant, or commanded soldiers, ran for office, or served as a minister. Until he was suddenly made full professor, without the Ph.D., his responsibilities were all solitary, or at most to a circle of friends, free to come and go. The prudence that Zarathustra talks of is what devices will protect one’s solitude; the sagacity Nietzsche talks of in Ecce Homo has, in addition, to do with how to handle one’s grumpy body. Nietzsche’s sense of redemption is wholly personal not political; even as world-redeemer he would be a personal re-creator god; and his sense of war is entirely spiritual. A Rommel, or a Lee, a Hannibal or a Fabius Maximus, he was not. It is possible to imagine Nietzsche as a Patton, leading a tank corps on a blitz or a Lippizaner rescue, but not winning other battles through deception, feint, retreat, counterattack, poise, measure, and understanding.[xlix] Still less had Nietzsche the sagacity of a Queen Elizabeth, a Halifax, a Churchill, a DeGaulle, or a Lincoln. Though Nietzsche was a political thinker — the center of his thought is the character of human life, both individual and earthwide — he did not recognize the statesman as a great type,[l] nor the virtue that distinguishes him, practical wisdom, as a great and human virtue, as in deed a noble and welcome form of loyalty to the earth. Nor did Nietzsche recognize the kinship of statesmanship and tragedy; how the statesman, like the artist Nietzsche so often praises, must often do ‘evil’ to serve good. The decisive event in World War II was Churchill’s bombing of the French Fleet at Oran; this bloody destruction of a recent ally caused Churchill tears, tears, tears, and yet it and it alone convinced the United States to toil and sweat and bleed, along with Britain.[li] Judging from Nietzsche‘s general esteem of Thucydides, in which similar ‘evil’ deeds are portrayed, we might say that he understood this, but since he gives us no detailed examples of it, we must conclude he had no eyes for the statesman. Nietzsche’s sense of rule was spiritual; he who could not have ruled a single country for a month aims to rule all for a thousand.[lii]
Yet, we must acknowledge that Nietzsche has now ruled the world for a hundred years. Today, a century after he first put forward his abysmal thoughts in Zarathustra, they offer us the best account of our modern situation. Not Marx and not Freud, but Nietzsche forecast the terrible wars of our time. Today the long war for the world that began in 1914 proceeds, as he said it would, avowedly in the East, with reluctance in the West. Being wars for the world and coming in democratic times, such wars would be fought for ideas, they would be like civil wars, they would be more fiercely contested and followed by more savage peaces than other wars.
The wars of our century, for the whole earth, are but part of a greater war to master nature, which he also foresaw. In his time he knew people who advanced such mastery, especially over pain, and he knew the wish for greater mastery, so as to eliminate all weather from life for example. Nietzsche foresaw that the balance between man and nature would shift enormously in the coming century. He also saw the ethical consequence: the possibility of what he calls ‘weightlessness,’ the state in which you cannot do much because he have nothing to put your shoulder against, in which you cannot rise much because you don’t have anything to push your foot against, in which everything has become too easy for man’s own good. The conquest of nature will bring forth the Last Man. Big science and little men. Against this victory over nature, he thought no resistance could be mounted; and precisely because none could be, he sought to educate the coming victors so that they would not be destroyed by the peace that would follow such a destructive conquest of nature.
Then, such victors will have to reinstitute nature; then the limitations and difficulties, pain, scarcity, fatigue, death, accident, weight, space, and time, which were once just there, will have to be willed and protected, in order to save man from becoming the Last Man. Once nature was a kind of mother, comforting and nourishing, limiting and punishing man. Now man will have to limit and punish himself. Now man will have to mother nature, lest without her he perish. Where once nature was responsible for keeping man man, now man will have to be responsible. For all that Nietzsche says about mastery, he is a prophet of self-control. One may wonder whether those who are attracted by the conquest of nature, by the ease, speed, immortality, and freedom from pain it promises are capable of such self-mastery. If offered the immortality Odysseus rejects again and again on his way home to Ithaka, would they have the same moderation?[liii]
IX. Nietzsche Once More
The world we live in was described by Nietzsche in the six books he wrote after Zarathustra. In these six he said “Behold the world.” In the seventh, Ecce Homo, he said “Behold the man.” This seventh book was indeed a rest from looking at the modern world, which he did not find “very good,” but the ease Nietzsche enjoys in Ecce Homo is no repose. It says, “Look at man as he might one day be, a man worthy of world mastery and strong enough to preserve nature. Look at such a man. Look at me. Look at man himself. I am a man become Man. Look at me.”
This is confirmed by the title. “Ecce Homo” are the words of a Roman soldier, a servant of Caesar, and a representative of his authority. By speaking them, Nietzsche compares himself to a Roman, a servant of Caesar, his representative. However, these words, “Ecce Homo” are also about Christ. So, by having these words point to himself, Nietzsche compares himself to Christ; he claims to be another Christ or the man to whom these words are rightly addressed. Combining as his title does both subject and speaker, Nietzsche is, then, something of a “Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ.” If so, then he amply fulfills the double claim of the title, Ecce Homo, which says both “Behold the man” and “Behold Man.”
I know of almost no one who has claimed such an authority. Only Sokrates, implicitly, and Christ, directly, if sometimes shyly, have claimed to have so become Man that all men should turn their way, hearken to their teachings, and imitate them. Well might we ask what evidence and what testimony might clinch such a claim. Both are to be found, if at all, in Nietzsche’s books, which you will have to read and study in order to judge. To convince you to do so has been my purpose and it was also one of the purposes that compelled Nietzsche to write Ecce Homo.
There is an additional Nietzschean reason that might convince us. For Nietzsche the measure of life, what orders all ranks, is the quality and the strength of love. Do you love your life so much that you would like to repeat it eternally? There is an analogous form of this measure he did not think of, and yet he measures up to it too. A lot of people, many of whom never read his works, met Nietzsche. Many of them left accounts of these meetings. They have been collected and a portion translated into English. Almost all show Nietzsche to have been gracious, at once polite and yet helpful, courteous and nevertheless filled with thoughts. All who report such meetings are grateful. “To see a great man close by during one’s developing years is a gift of grace of immeasurable and indestructible value,”[liv] begins the recollection of one woman so privileged, Maria von Bradke. How many of us would trust our eternity, our reputation or our salvation, to the recollections of all those with whom we had walked a bit together? If the eternal return of the same preserves all that was great in the idea of eternity, the loss of which Nietzsche feared would destroy man, the measure of whether those who knew you would say of your life “Yes, once more!” restores the measure of fame. The fame that Nietzsche sought, through publishing Ecce Homo, to win in the hearts of those of his readers who might never know him personally had already been won in the hearts of those who did meet him. The book of these recollected conversations might unite all his conversants, living and dead, in one affirmation, “Was that Nietzsche, why then once more.” Or, simply, “Behold the Man.”
Dr. Michael Platt Friends of the Republic
Caboose: for reconsideration: if, per imposibile, no regrets, still Kaufmann’s point, that there are no excuses, stands; signs of madness, look again; he was nearer than I concede; consider Girard.
Endnotes
[i] For that “little” see “Shakespearean Wisdom?” in Shakespeare as Political Thinker, eds. John Alvis & Thomas G. West (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1981), pp. 257-276; Second Edition (Intercollegiate Studies Institute: Wilmington, 2000), pp. 353-379.
[ii] Work on this essay began with good students at Dartmouth, advanced with more at the University of Dallas, and at Heidelberg; its first version was written during a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar (and delivered to a panel at the American Political Science Association Convention); for several years it was held by Harold Alderman for publication; subsequent revision was accomplished on an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, with additions on an NEH Fellowship. My thanks to all of these, and to my hosts at Penn State, Stanley Rosen, the irreplaceable David Lachterman, and Jim Wiley, my former student. And to Nietzsche Studien for publishing it (Band XXII). The present version includes some corrections and a few augmentations.
[iii] Kritische Gesamtausgabe von Nietzsches Briefwechsel ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1975-1984 ), III (3), No. 581; Middleton’s good selection of the letters, in English, gives this one an incorrect date. All quotations from Nietzsche are cited from the Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1967-78), 30 Vols., abbreviated KGA; the Kritische Studienausgabe (DTV/de Gruyter, 1980), by the same editors, follows the KGA and is abbreviated KSA; all translations are by Walter Kaufmann, some with slight changes; abbreviations for Nietzsche’s books are the usual ones; e.g., EH for Ecce Homo.
[iv] Or released it in an impersonal book, as he did, in Morgenröte No. 566.
[v] See The Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, trans. M. Nunberg (New York: International Universities Press, 1974), Vol. II, (meeting of 28 October 1908 on Ecce Homo), p. 32; for an excellent account of the relation of Freud to Nietzsche, see Lorin Anderson, “Freud, Nietzsche” Salmagundi [Nos. 47-48, 1980] pp. 3-29; for the way the epigone Freud worked to bring about the worst fears of the master, the Last Man as Therapeutic Man, see Philip Rief’s Freud: Mind of a Moralist and its sequel, Therapeutic Man. For Freud’s low perspective read anything of his on something high, for example on Leonardo, or his patronizing remark on Sophocles’ Oedipus. On fairy tales, whose authors he could have no access to, he was better, as E. H. Gombrich pointed out.
[vi] This remark appears in the Nachlass (leftovers) of the 1880s; see F. N., Werke in Drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlecta (München: Hanser Verlag, 1956), III, p. 430. Hegel said it earlier, but he thought it progress: Hoffmeister edition of 1936 (not 2nd ed.) in “Aus der Jenenser Dozenten-Zeit, No. 31 (p. 360).
[vii] Götzen-Dämmerung, “Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen,” No. 5.
[viii] There is some reason to believe that Nietzsche favors infanticide (Frolicsome Science, 73), but not contraception or abortion (except on a pro-life basis, protecting the life of the mother). Admitting that Walter Kaufmann had good reason to translate, Fröhliche, as Gay, but conceding that a polemical effort to narrow the semantic range of the word in English has succeeded, David Lachterman and I came up with Frolicsome, which has the virtue of being cognate with Fröhliche. (May D. L. now repose in frolicsome peace.)
[ix] Variations of the formula “Behold…” are repeated as the narrative proceeds, by Pilate: “Behold your king,” and by Jesus on the Cross: “Behold your son” and “Behold your mother.”
[x] KGW, 7:2, 289; this leftover (Nachlass), belongs to the period Sommer-Herbst 1884. Elizabeth Nietzsche put it in her arrangement of the leftovers, The Will to Power, as No. 983. For reasons Walter Kaufmann stresses in his warning preface to his translation of The Will to Power (1967), and others mentioned below, I shall print the title to this non-book with strike-thru marks.
[xi] Nietzsche employed a four part division in another book, Fröhliche Wissenschaft, deliberately I think, since it ends with the appearance of the new god of wrath, beatitude, and love, Zarathustra. That he added a Book Five later accords with his assertion that Christ died too young and the fact that it was written after Zarathustra, who refuses to go down to the city and get killed, but instead remains in the mountains, eats a gay supper with students, and celebrates a comic festival. Not accidentally, Zarathustra too is in four books.
[xii] Several of these observations are indebted to Leon Craig’s unpublished paper “Nietzsche’s ‘Apology’: On Reading Ecce Homo.” What I say about the place of Christ in Ecce Homo will allow readers of Craig’s interpretation to understand why I cannot entirely agree with his stunning conclusion. To others who have not read his paper, I can only say that Craig is the kind of reader Nietzsche talks about in Ecce Homo: “a born adventurer and discoverer,” whose careful “deductions” lead to a stunning “guess,” and whose manly spirit and wit would please Nietzsche himself.
[xiii] This numerical comparison is noticed by Hugh J. Silverman in “The Autobiographical Textuality of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo,” in Why Nietzsche Now, ed. Daniel O’Hara (Bloomington: Indiana U. P. 1985 [earlier as a special issue of Boundary 2]), pp. 141 ff.; the essay is limited to the first few pages of Ecce Homo, unfortunately. In the same volume, I found another contributor, Charles Altieri (pp. 389 ff.) who has noticed Nietzsche’s comparison of himself with Christ. In this volume there is also an essay on EH, sort of, by Rodolphe Gasché; see also another ‘sort of’ by him in Looking After Nietzsche, ed. Laurence A. Rickels (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990).
[xiv] It is well to note that in Latin versus is not the same as contra, that it sometimes even means towards, that Nietzshce would have known the difference, and that Nietzsche used for the title of Nietzsche Contra Wagner.
[xv] In support of these various views, some, including many doctors, find an efficient physical cause of Nietzsche‘s subsequent madness. They, or rather one of them, may be right, but none have, I think, proved their case, and even if we exhumed Nietzsche’s corpse, we might have a hard time distinguishing evidence of disease from evidence that Nietzsche, like many in the nineteenth century, took various concoctions that included things we now know to be poisonous; Nietzsche often wrote his own prescriptions; being a “Dr.” and having a hard-to-decipher hand, they were filled. For some of those who find a bodily cause of Nietzsche’s madness, e.g. Dr. Karl Jaspers, it saves the books of Nietzsche for thought, but for others finding such an efficient cause “explains” the mad opinions in the books, which we need then pay no thoughtful attention to. For Jaspers, see his Nietzsche trans. Charles F. Wallraff and Fredrick J. Schmitz (Chicago: Regnery, 1969; original 1935); however, note his sympathetic account of Nietzsche’s “Friends and [his] Loneliness.”
[xvi] This riddle, explicitly so called by Nietzsche, has been much attended to by Derrida (cited below) and his American train, but with no solutions provided, nor much attempt. It is true that explaining Hamlet’s riddles to a Polonius would only make him all the more certain Hamlet is mad, but failure to try, once you’ve fussed with the matter, is no help. And, considering the Freudianism of Derrida and his train, finding a reason in riddles is absolutely required. Not that Freud’s paradoxical faith that there is more order, reason, and plan in madness than in reason, including books, is other than a methodical madness. As to Nietzsche, it is almost always true that if you need something witty explained to you, it can’t be.
[xvii] Silverman (cited above) rightly observes that the second part of the title indicates this is a manual as well as an autobiography.
[xviii] I think klug is better translated “sagacious” and Klugheit sagacity, than Kaufmann’s clever and cleverness. Clever has a lower range, including ‘tricky,’ ‘corner-cutting,’ and even ‘deceiving,’ ‘cunning,’ and ‘cruel,’ than klug, certainly as Nietzsche employs or means it. According to him, this virtue never includes either deception or cruelty. Nor is there any petty, commercial, or sensual purpose in it. When Nietzsche claimed he never coveted women, honor, or wealth, he seems to have been honest. Fame, recognition, power perhaps, but not these usual objects of merely clever men.
[xix] The theme of Alexander Nehamas’ Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard, 1985) is important and the author’s disposition serious; unfortunately, his understanding of literature is not Nietzsche’s; thus, on almost every page things from Nietzsche’s Nachlass are mixed with sentences from his books, and these sentences are not understood in their context: the passage, the section, the book. The leftovers (Nachlass) of Nietzsche are more interesting than almost all books, but there is a world of difference between them and the beautiful books he wrote. Beautiful — that means with every word exactly where it should be, perfectly related to all others, splendid.
[xx] In the Untimely Observation, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (Section 4), Nietzsche names as the three greatest sufferings for the individual, “that men do not share all knowledge in common, that ultimate insight can never be certain, that abilities are divided unequally.”
[xxi] Fröhliche Wissenschaft, 310.
[xxii] For further interpretation, based on Nietzsche’s other works, see my “Nature and The Order of Rank,” Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. XXII: 1988, pp. 147-165.
[xxiii] The only mention of nature, the word, in Zarathustra (II 17, “On the Poets”) is somewhat ironic or ambiguously.
[xxiv] For more, see “What Does Zarathustra Whisper in Life’s Ear?” Nietzsche Studien, Vol. XVII: 1988, pp. 179-194.
[xxv] On the style of Nietzsche, especially in this book, see the citation-rich essay of Hans-Martin Gauger, “Nietzsches Stil am Beispiel von Ecce Homo,” Nietzsche Studien Vol. XIII (1984), pp. 332-355.
[xxvi] If the seamless unity between life and work which Nietzsche claims he achieved in Ecce Homo justifies Heidegger in paying so much attention to letters and leftovers, it also criticizes him for not paying enough attention to Nietzsche’s claims that Zarathustra is the peak of his life and work — a life and work which in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche clearly, pace Heidegger, represents as perfect, even if not finished.
[xxvii] If so, Zarathustra I was a bit premature, since elephants gestate 22 months.
[xxviii] Without the name he does refer to the substance of its test of Zarathustra, in “Wise,” 4.
[xxix] See Fröhliche Wissenschaft No. 341.
[xxx] Walter Kaufmann’s reluctant translation (with R. J. Hollingdale) of The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1967) is prefaced by a good account of the effect of this non-book on Nietzsche’s reputation and a sober warning about the status of the materials, to English-speaking Nietzsche scholars, who have largely ignored it. The editorial work of Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, especially their faithfully chronological edition of the Nachlass, has only added to the story and underlined the warning. Although Nietzsche considered writing a book with this title (twenty-five plans were found among his literary remains), he not only never published and never wrote one, he had definitely abandoned a project with this title by the first days of September 1888; in the months remaining to him, Nietzsche put together Götzen-Dämmerung and Der Antichrist, assembled Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and wrote Ecce Homo nearly from scratch; as Mazzino Montinari says, “der Rest ist — Nachlass.” See Montinari’s “Nietzsche’s Nachlass von 1885 bis 1888 oder Textkritik und Wille zur Macht” in Nietzsche Lesen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1982), pp. 92-119; Montinari’s article appeared earlier, in 1975. For a judicious assessment of the philosophical consequences of Montinari’s philological discoveries for Anglo-Saxon interpretation, see Bernd Magnus, “The Use and Abuse of The Will to Power,” in Reading Nietzsche ed. Robert C. Solomon & Kathleen M. Higgins (Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 218-235. The article also relates some speculations, arrived at together with myself, about what the Nietzsche’s landlord at Sils Maria did with some of the Nachlass. That there is still (1992) no English translation of the Montinari/ Colli arrangement of the Nachlass is the shame of English-speaking Nietzsche scholarship. Perhaps this is to be explained by its scandal: the number of prominent members who treat Nietzsche’s Nachlass on a par with his books. Other shames are: no translation of the Janz biography, Löwith’s book not translated; nor Eugen Fink’s; nor Müller-Lauter’s. (1997: the Löwith book is out, and a twenty-volume English translation of whole Montinari/ Colli text is underway, under the direction of Ernst Behler, from Stanford Press; however, none of the eleven volumes that will translate the Nachlass into English for the first time are out.)
[xxxi] See my review of Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume Four: Nihilism, trans. by David F. Krell (Harper & Row, 1982) in The Review of Metaphysics (March 1984), pp. 637-639.
[xxxii] Consider the well known books by Danto and Schacht, the latter head of the North American Nietzsche Society and the author of perhaps the longest tome on Nietzsche in any language; neither observes the distinction between what Nietzsche perfected for publication and what he had no opportunity either to perfect or to destroy. Although these scholars write books, they do not know what a book is; Nietzsche did know and requires readers who do, or who are willing to learn from him. To write a book on Nietzsche in a series on “Arguments of the Philosophers” one has to ignore all Nietzsche said against systematizers, in all his small books. To write a book with a title such as Danto’s, Nietzsche As Philosopher one has to be not only cheeky, as Lionel Trilling observed, but unaware of whose presence one is in, Nietzsche’s, a philosopher.
[xxxiii] Recent favorites are Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan. One can have no a priori objection to a preference for another thinker than Nietzsche — one would even like a confrontation, provided Nietzsche gets his say in — but working Nietzsche over from the unexamined view of someone else is neither interpretation nor thinking. Since Gary Schipiro, “How One Becomes What One Is Not,” Nietzschean Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1989), pp. 142-167, is almost alone in confronting Montinari’s philological work, I wish he had thought Nietzsche a greater authority than Lacan.
[xxxiv] On Ecce Homo, more exactly evading it, see his Otobiographies: L’enseignement de N. et la politique de nom propre (Paris: Galilee, 1984); translation: The Ear of the Other ed. Christie V. McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Schocken Books, 1985); note Derrida’s error in counting Nietzsche’s years and in the discussion section, see the fine questions of Eugene Vance; for a good summary of Derrida on Nietzsche, see Ernst Behler, “Nietzsche and Deconstruction,” in Nietzsche, Literature, and Values, ed. Volker Dürr et al, (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1988); it is true, as Behler says, that Nietzsche anticipated Derrida. Indeed he did. with nausea and with the defense that is Ecce Homo.
[xxxv] For a model of reading Nietzsche, confronting him with the thought of another, and thinking oneself, see Charles M. Natoli, Nietzsche and Pascal on Christianity (New York: Peter Lang, 1985).
[xxxvi] Colli and Montinari’s Kritische Studienausgabe (Vol. 10, p. 137) places this remark somewhere between November 1882 and February 1883, when Nietzsche wintered in Rapallo, began and finished Zarathustra I. In it Nietzsche thinks of himself as creating something, the vision of the Übermensch (or Zarathustra?), while later in Ecce Homo, Zarathustra is treated as a gift and revelation as well as an invention. The usual “Superman” and “Overman” translate Nietzsche’s Übermensch poorly, I think; the former because the Comic Book has vulgarized its nobility; the latter because it sounds high-minded, empty, and static. Since the Übermensch is over, above, and beyond man, man so far, only by being one who ever surpasses himself, I prefer the word “surpassing”; it and its elided version “passing” belong to the treasury of Shakespearean English: “much surpassing the common praise it bears,” “passing fair,” and “passing strange” (Winter’s Tale, 3.1.2; Romeo and Juliet, 1.1.234; Othello, 1.3.160).
[xxxvii] Printed by Walter Kaufmann in an appendix to his English translation (1967). Gast and Föster are included in the three German types so vilified. However, it should be reiterated that although Nietzsche attached some instructions for its publication, he sent it all to Paraguay, not the publisher.
[xxxviii] Zarathustra shows a similar failing in only belatedly appreciating his animals (Zarathustra IV) who were, I am certain, provided by the University of Basel. Like Nietzsche, Zarathustra is tempted to believe that a philosopher can live outside the city, that one can be a man apart from other men.
[xxxix] Altieri (previously cited) thinks you can have truthfulness without truth and believes Nietzsche thought so.
[xl] The passage together with editorial information appears in Mazzino Montinari’s “Ein neuer Abschnitt in Nietzsches ‘Ecce Homo,’ ” in his Nietzsche Lesen (cited above). An excellent translation of this passage by David Krell, appears in his “Consultations with the Paternal Shadow,” in Nietzsche in Italy ed. Thomas Harrison (Stanford University: ANMA Libri, 1988, pp. 232-233; this volume also includes a translation of a few pages from Anacleto Verrecchia’s La catastrophe di Nietzsche a Torino (Torino: Einaudi, 1978); the Harrison volume also contains several other essays on or around Ecce Homo, including the surpassing one by René Girard.
[xli] For more in this vien, see Woody Allen’s subsequent “Also Ate Zarathustra” The New Yorker 3 July 2006.
[xlii] Noticing how good food and good coffee is appreciated in Willa Cather’s novels and hearing of her reputation as a cook, Roger and Linda Welsch went on to discover her recipes. See their Cather’s Kitchens.
[xliii] On the progress of Nietzsche into madness, see the pertinent parts of the KGA, Montinari’s article on the shifting plans of Nietzsche in late 1888 (mentioned above), and the new material on Nietzsche’s time in Turin in Anacleto Verrecchia, Zarathustra’s Ende: Die Katastrophe Nietzsches in Turin (H. Böhlau: Wien, 1986), a translation from the author’s Italian original of 1978 (Einaudi). Verrecchia’s hostility to Nietzsche’s thought, however reasonable, makes one wonder if there is bias in the account, since no great appreciation of what was lost in this catastrophe is evident. On the madness itself, was its cause organic or psychic? etc. see as a guide to the considerable literature, Horst Althaus, Friedrich Nietzsche: Eine bürgerliche Tragödie (München: Nymphenburger, 1985) and the judicious considerations of Daniel Breazeale, “Ecce Psycho: Remarks on the Case of Nietzsche,” International Studies in Philosophy XXIII/2 (1992) pp. 19-33.
[xliv] In one respect Nietzsche seems superior to Zarathustra; he acknowledges the contribution of more things in his past to his becoming who he is; he speaks of his parents, whereas Zarathustra never does.
[xlv] That Nietzsche signed some of his last letters “The Crucified” does not, I think, count as evidence of his “succumbing to the enemy” since Christ is praised very highly in Der Antichrist. If “The Crucified” means that Nietzsche now survives his own death and that his “death” was gruesome and terrible, it might be evidence. However, the tone of his letters is agitated and joyous, not terrified, though the cause of justified concern in others.
[xlvi] The suspicion that Nietzsche chose madness is worked out in great detail by Claudia Crawford in her adventurous and ardent To Nietzsche: Dionysus, I Love You, Ariadne (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995); the case, which in its nature is hard to prove, since if true then the man tried to prevent us learning it, is harder still, even to prove probable, because so many of the pertinent facts of Nietzsche‘s life are now so removed; nevertheless, the case is made very plausible by Crawford. If Nietzsche faked madness, it was a grave fault. I can understand why a Brutus has to play mad, to deceive a tyrant, but I cannot think it necessary for Nietzsche. And to fail to write on as he was so capable of just in order draw attention to oneself and one’s writings is folly indeed. No gift-giving virtue there. No Nietzsche.
[xlvii] On these matters and much else, see the excellent remarks of René Girard, “Dionysus versus the Crucified,” Modern Language Notes, Vol. 99 (No. 4), (1984) pp. 816-835; also reprinted in Nietzsche in Italy. Although The Bacchae was for Nietzsche the paradigmatic tragedy and although he sometimes encourages vengeance, I must point out that he struggles with it and in Zarathustra celebrates its hero’s overcoming of both vengeance and resentiment.
[xlviii] See the middle section of my “Nature and The Order of Rank,” Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. XXII: 1988, pp. 147-165.
[xlix] See Charles DeGaulle’s criticism of the fault of the German generals in W.W.I as Nietzschean, as lacking ”measure,” in his La Discorde Chez L’Ennemi (Plon: Paris, 1924).
[l] His reference to “our statesmen” in Der Antichrist No. 38, though respectful is back-handed.
[li] For a further comparison of Nietzsche and Churchill, the only man since to confront the question of ‘life once more,’ see my “Nietzsche, Churchill, and the End of the Human Species,” when it appears.
[lii] It must be remarked that Nietzsche’s way of writing and his disposition toward the whole requires and encourages an equivalent, in matters of thought, to practical wisdom, perhaps one should call it judgment. His enigmatic and sparkling remarks constantly teach the reader to judge according to circumstance, tone and context, to endure contradiction and uncertainty, and to suspect simplicity.
[liii] For further thoughts, see my “Would Human Life Be Better Without Death?” Soundings, LXIII (3): Fall 1980, pp. 321-338.
[liv] See Conversations with Nietzsche edited by Sander L. Gilman and translated by David J. Parent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 188; for the originals and more of them, see Sander Gilman, Begegenung mit Nietzsche 2nd. ed. (Bonn: Bouvier, 1987).
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