Preface – Nihilism and Nietzsche
“Caught you. you nihilist”, said Nietzsche to Flaubert upon discovering that Flaubert had thoughts only while sitting ((,D, II, 34)1 “Caught you, you nihilist,” many have said to Nietzsche since then upon discovering that his thoughts set people marching. Still others have thanked him, “You caught me, set me walking, and so I found myself.”
Were Nietzsche to be put on trial, with all his readers a jury, what would the vote be? Has he corrupted the West? Did he introduce a new god? And supposing Socrates could cast an absentee ballot from the Blessed Isles, how would it go? And if he voted “guilty,” what would that reveal about his own case? Or would it merely mean he wanted Nietzsche to join him for a Spaziergang?
Today there is much discussion of Nietzsche and nihilism. Some discover in him the arch nihilist, someone to revile away at. Still others glory in playing this Darth Vader of the spirit.
Is Nietzsche such a nihilist?
“No,” shout a chorus in French. “Nietzsche falls short of us. He was on occasion mild-mannered and often lapsed into writing well. And how can he be so gay! Deconstruct him.” And they begin their dour play.
Despite being nihilists, or rather because of it, the latter are more right about Nietzsche than the former, as one sees when one thinks about some thing Nietzsche has more to say about than nihilism, namely, nature.
1. What Nature is Not and Is. (4060 words)
Since what Nietzsche says nature is not is more emphatic than what he says nature is, we may begin to understand nature by following his emphasis.
First of all and always, nature is not what its enemies take it to be. Nietzsche opposes all valuations of nature as worthless compared to anything
supernatural, an afterlife or a true world, anything beyond or below our earth (A, 43; GD, V; Z I~ Vorrede; Z II, 1). Such valuations claim to know more than can be known; nature is life and Life knows only life (JGB, 9). The only Being we can recognize is the Being of Becoming (Z Ill 16). The only eternity we can love may end (Z III, 15). Those who devalue Life also contradict themselves. Life cannot say “Life is no good ‘ (GD, lll; Vl, 5). At work in such self-contradicting valuations as Nietzsche finds in Platonism and Christianity is self-hatred (le moi est haïssable – Pascal) or, more exactly, the spirit of revenge, against the changeable, the becoming, growing, begetting and dying, against ourselves (Z I, 3, 4; FW, ’94; Z II, 15). But death is no opposite to life. It is a part and the dead may be a type of the living (JGB 9); 1 among them one may find the best of friends (M, 566). Nor is death an objection to life. Without death life would be weightless. Only .against the gravity of time can anything noble arise. A deathless being could not love itself properly. Can Life? Life is good but hard. Life requires that we love her with whole heart and whole mind. By so doing we may be able to will her “once more”. Because Life is good and hard, it may be very good. The only god Nietzsche hails is a living mortal one (JGB, 295, 56; CD, Xl, 5).[1]
Nature is also not what the indifferent take it to be. Darwin is wrong. Life is not a striving for self-preservation. Nature is a struggle not to exist but to overcome, to prevail and to triumph, even in defeat (GD, 14; FW, 349). Look at how a wave approaches the beach, approaches its destruction. Look at the next wave, undaunted it sweeps in. Nature is wave and will-to-power (FW, 310). And so is Life (JGB, 36). Life is no niche-seeker or nook dweller. Nor is man. Man is the most courageous animal (GM, lll~ ~8; ~IV, 15). Yes, man is an animal, his origins are low. What is remarkable is how high the low can climb (JGB, 275). Every true account of Man’s origins will celebrate the virtues by which man left his origins behind and the virtues by which he might overcome himself further; among these virtues is a certain ignorance or ignoring, for example, an ignoring of origins. Man is the animal with red cheeks; his pride and his shame as well as his courage drive him upward. Life is overcoming and man creates most in life’s image. Man is the great overcomer; he is not an Englishman. Unfortunately, nature may be tragic; the “fittest” may be a herd and prevail against the eagles. Europe, for example, may succumb to the English (JGB, 252; (,A~).
Nature is also not what its friends suppose it to be The ancient moralists of nature, the Stoics, read law into nature. They regarded nature as purposeful, economical, just and considerate, although severe, indeed severe because considerate, like a pater familias (JGB, 9). But nature is not moral. She is prodigal, indifferent, outrageous and noble (JGB, 188). However although the Stoics are wrong about nature, they are a piece of nature. Obedience, even to arbitrary laws, tyranny and especially self-tyranny, are ever the way
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men became more worthwhile (JGB, 188). Deliberate breeding is a pitchfork that can subdue nature (JGB, 264). Like Stoics, like Christians, with this difference: Christian natural law teaching provides the slavish with the anticipated pleasures of punishing the virtuous (GM, 1, 15). The Christian natural lawyers are not a piece of nature. In modern physics Christian natural law becomes democratic, and remains wrong. Lifeless nature knows necessities not laws (JGB, 22;MA, 11, 9). Lifeless nature is purposeless; it is not a machine or an animal. In the universe our solar system is the exception, our planet an exception within an exception. Most of everything is dead. The living may be a type of the dead. In the universe chaos is the order, order the exception. Even mater is not eternal (FW, 109; WS, 14)—Epicurus was an idealist. The universe is an impermanent stage, life a brave player, tragedy the only theodicy (GT, 5; JBG, 56) [2]2
Nature is also not what its modern friends take it to be. Without the forbidding Christian God, Christian morals impoverish life. Camels who once bore Biblical burdens now take it easy, go botanize, become scholars, penitently gather leeches, work breathlessly, or will anything rather than not will (Z 1, 1; JGB, Vl; Z IV, 15; FW, 329; GM, III, 14). But nature’s first commandment is not “relax.” Nature is not as free as free thinkers think. Nature is hard and wants us hard. Freedom from the Christian God is not freedom from Christian morals ((,D X, 5; FW, 343); freedom from Christian morals is not freedom for anything ((,D, X, 38-41) The freedom of nature requires a “yes” and a “no” from man and it points directly up to a goal (GD, II, 44). Nature is not a solitary sweet Eden we need only follow Rousseau back to. Pity is the practice of nihilism (A, 7); it is anti-natural to save the unnatural: the defective, sick, misbegotten, and expiring (JGB, 62). Nor is Rousseau sweet. This moralist thirsted for blood. “Equality” is a cry of revenge against nature (GD, X, 48; Z II, 7). The French Revolution was the first result; socialism, general leveling and various emancipations are the aftermath that smolders on. In 1917 the Revolution was replayed, without liberty and fraternity to check equality, with a result far more bloody and far more drab. Marx’s heaven on earth would be Nietzsche’s hell. Life without suffering would be insufferable. One can only hope for another Napoleon, a man sweet and clean, with the talents and talons of the beast of prey, a throwback to nature as the Renaissance admired it, in short an ascent to something natural (GD, X, 45; GM I, 16;JGB, 209). There is no equality in nature (GD, X, 48). Nature knows an order of rank.
This order of rank is beyond good and evil. It stems from no civil society (or herd) or wise man (shepherd serving the herd). It was not given by a god, is not the possession of a single people, and is not a code of laws. This natural order of rank is not primarily an order of goods, each desirable as a step to another. Although Nietzsche acknowledges such an order of goods (JGB, 83),
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His emphasis is elsewhere; after one’s house burns one eventually eats lunch, but only eventually. The good is too utilitarian; nature is nobler than Socratic teaching. Virtue, like a mother, never asks to be paid (Z II 5); if anything it wants to pay (Z 111, 1′:5); the good and the noble are not only distinct but opposed (Z 1, 8). The order of rank is beyond good as well as beyond good and evil. It runs from stuff to art, origin to goal, sickness to health and from the base to the noble, and it includes both. It is a long ladder (JGB, ~57;MA Preface) and it is crowned by the virtues. four among them are courage, insight, sympathy and solitude (JGB, 284; cf. M,556~.3 Others are cleanliness (JGB, 271), eagle pride and snake sagacity (Z), pugnacity (Z 1, 10), moderation (GM, III, 8; FW, 210)~ justice (CD, X, 48), love (JGB, 153; FW, 334); Mitfreude(FW, 338), cruelty (FW, 325), making (FW, 299-303), gift-giving (Z 1), prankishness (A, 51) gaiety (FW, 1), wisdom (EH, 1), graciousness (JGB, 273), counting privileges as duties (JGB, 272). how much one can suffer (JGB, 270), respect for masks (ibid.), self-love (JGB, 265), composure (JGB, 266), an instinct for rank (JGB, 263), reverence (ibid.), friendship (FW, 279;Z I, 14;JGB, Aftersong), nausea (JGB, 285), laughter (JGB, 294), no need for nobility (JGB, 287), being afraid of being understood (JGB, 290), and the genius of the heart (JGB, 295). One could go on, for subtlety too is a virtue with Nietzsche. It must be, for often much depends on the context, the time, the persons, the multiple effects, and the perspective; e.g. there is reason to consider courtesy as a virtue (M, 566) and as a cheerful vice (JGB, 284); somewhat similarly Goethe is a great man among the moderns (GD, X, 49) but not a most great man among the ancients (GD, Xl, 4). The ladder of rank is so long that the virtues of a common man may be the vices of a philosopher (JGB, 30). Nature disappoints whoever thirsts for the unconditional; to venerate and despise with nuances is the best gain of life (JGB, 31). Gaining it, one might see how something can emerge from its opposite (JGB, 2), how virtue might emerge from vice, and how an unnatural man who was not anti-natural might become virtuous.
Although the virtues are at bottom always achieved through an often painful overcoming of something natural, they are also natural that is, in accord with the nature of things, everywhere and at all times potential, and often enough possible. They are naturally evident; what a man takes pleasure in (e.g. EH, I, 2) what he avoids (GM, III, 8), what he finds laborious (MA I, 462), what he is injured by (JGB, 276) and what he rejoices in (EH, FW, 318) rank him. Although the order of rank was found and, in a sense, invented (i.e. the way chivalry enhanced and refined “nobility”, M, 199), it was not created. Values may be created by men (and should be revalued, which means destroyed, by men) but the virtues are not created. “Become what you are,” they say to man.
Opposed to them are the vices: cowardice, dishonesty, slavishness, ideal-
ism, neighbor love, pity, moralism, vengefulness, gregariousness, indelicacy, mediocrity, wretched contentment, suspiciousness, dour spirits, heaviness, all smallness and many “virtues” lauded in most ages (JGB, IX). In opposing the virtues the vices seem to be antinatural (GD, Vl) without being unnatural (JGB, 62).
Opposed to the virtuous man, the noble man, the Surpassing Man, are the slave, the sick, the socialist, the saint, the priest, the nihilist and the Last Man. In the indifferent middle are the scientist (FW, 373) and the scholar (FW, 366 and JGB, 6 and Vl). There are also the sham virtuous (Z II, 5), the righteous (Z III, 12: 26) and the sham wise (Z II, 8). Being more natural, lawbreakers are often more virtuous than them (GD, X, 45). In opposing the virtuous or noble man the vicious are always anti-natural and may also be unnatural (JGB 62).
Granted then that the virtues are natural, what is their relation to nature as will-to-power? Clearly if everywhere nature is will-to-power then when a man overpowers nature in himself he is quite natural. If nature is overcoming, then overcoming nature is natural. If the virtues are forms of will-to-power, then they are natural as well as in accord with nature. It is easy to see that courage, shame, and self-love require the overcoming of something and thus can be seen as forms of will-to-power. Affirmation such as Zarathustra exhibits at the very end of Zarathustra III (16) is, however, somewhat perplexing, since Zarathustra now affirms petty and squalid things, even unto eternity, that he has long striven to overcome in himself and to destroy in others. It seems that on the way up the ladder of the order of rank one overcomes things that at the very top can finally be overcome only through affirmation. More difficult to understand is how such virtues as insight, solitude, and love, which Zarathustra exhibits in his farewell to Life towards the end of Zarathustra III (13—15), can be understood as will-to-power or overcoming. Need we insist? Perhaps Nietzsche was not a systematic thinker, in the sense in which he derided them. Moreover, as Zarathustra proceeds to its peak, will-to-power is replaced first by courage, then love, and finally affirmation. Perhaps love of Life is not always an overcoming and perhaps insight, whatever its origins in struggle, is free in its fullness. As you climb the mountain, climbing higher and seeing more go step by step, but once you reach the top seeing without climbing is possible (JGB, 273). Perhaps this enigma can be explained by something puzzling in Nietzsche. At the very top of his order of rank, there are not one but two paragons of virtue, one belonging to the future, Zarathustra, and the other belonging to the past. Dionysus. Why?
Although nature is nature everywhere and always, nature has a history. There is a history of nature because the crown of nature, man, has a history. Man’s origins are base. Centuries of suffering, of obedience to ghosts, of
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hard breeding, made man a better beast. The Greeks were something fine. A natural gratitude to nature was their religion (JGB, 49). Dionysus was their name for the vigorous life they lived, for the instinctual feeling that despite suffering “Life is good”, even in death. Among the Greeks virtue was first understood as tragic virtue. Between this virtue and us stand Platonism and, even more, Christianity with its popular complaints against life. Nevertheless, Zarathustra’s task does not seem to be a simple return to the Greeks. To the Dionysian feeling “Life is good” must be added the deliberate and hard-won affirmation “Life is good”. It is hard to know whether this deliberate affirmation is a sign of greater strength or of weakness. Certainly the Greeks do not seem to have had to struggle as much as Zarathustra. To be sure, they did not have to overcome Christianity. Does Zarathustra’s overcoming of Christianity mean his affirmation is higher, nobler than Dionysus’ feeling? Certain it is that eternal return is a feeling in Dionysus but an achievement for Zarathustra.
Perhaps the explanation for this difference lies in the peculiar situation of the present time. Man in whom nature most shows its character as overcoming is about to overcome nature itself. Nietzsche lived on the edge of the future and saw into it. In the five score and more years since his death the mastery of nature has advanced more than in the previous twenty-three centuries. In peace the ideal of a life without suffering, which Nietzsche sensed especially in socialism, has advanced and daily advances this mastery; in war the total organization of a people and the interpretation of everything as a resource, whose tempo he felt in the increased militarism of late 19th century Europe, advanced and daily advances this mastery. In totalitarianism the two meet: total organization of life for war, justified by an ideal of happiness without suffering. We have so nearly mastered nature and are consequently in such danger of losing all virtue that nothing Greek will suffice; such mastery and such a possibility of the Last Man were impossible for the Greeks. Now only a deliberate affirmation of life will enable us to protect nobility. Only a deliberate affirmation of suffering, which means deliberate “cruelty”, will resist the pity working against life now (FW, 73). Only a deliberate affirmation that life with death is better than life without it will maintain the virtues that make man worth esteeming (M, 211). All that in nature was unavoidable for the Greeks must now be willed. The carefree reign of chance and nonsense is over (JGB, 203; CM, II, 2). It is therefore either the Surpassing Man or the Last Man. While the victory of the Last Man will mean the extinction of the Surpassing Man, the victory of the Surpassing Man will mean the preservation of some Last Men. This much nonsense is needed if the whole order of rank is to be preserved. Being a Surpassing Man means affirming the Last Man. The natural order of rank, which is in such jeopardy now, includes both the Surpassing Man who ascends it and the Last Man who denies its existence with a happy blink.
SS; ~ c~
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In October of 1888 Nietzsche found a third paragon of virtue to go with Dionysus and Zarathustra, at the very top of the natural order of rank; by writing Ecce Homo, in which he affirms his life, Nietzsche reached the top. The life Nietzsche tells in Ecce Homo isone of almost daily pain, ill health, and, what is important, overcoming these. That Nietzsche retells his life as he does is his affirmation of it. His affirmation is a preparation for death, a “free death” as he called it (Z I, 21), in which one blesses life without clinging to it (JGB, 96). Nietzsche announced his arrival at the top of the order of rank to the world because the new age of ease approaching as nature is more and more mastered will need examples of men who affirm nature including pain (FW, 48), illness and death, who will not out of pity, which means weakness, try to remove suffering from life, who will for example reject all pain-killers and prefer a free death to a medically lingering one, who will, in short, reject ‘”heroic measures” and be heroic instead (GD, X, 36).
Unlike Dionysus and unlike Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes and he publishes what he writes. No one has ever, as far as he knows, achieved the affirmation he has. Certainly no one has published such an affirmation. Although such a declaration and such a book follow from the fundamental thought in Zarathustra, there is an important difference between Zarathustra and Nietzsche. Although both affirm nature at the highest point in their climb up the natural order of rank, only Nietzsche makes war (in the Antichrist) and makes ready to rule the world (in Ecce Homo). Although Zarathustra praises war and teaches that the best do want to rule, he remains in the mountains pacific and apolitical after his affirmation. Nietzsche’s affirmation is pugnacious and political. Nietzsche seems to have felt the spiritual fragility of man at the present time, when for the first time he discovers that he has created the gods, and the literal fragility of nature, when it is about to be overcome by man, more than Zarathustra (Z I, Vorrede, 7); Zarathustra might agree with the Antichrist but would never write it; he might esteem the affirmation in Ecce Homo but not its being published. By the time Nietzsche wrote the Antichrist and Ecce Homo, he had decided that in the present situation of nature those privileged to stand at the top of the natural order of rank have a duty to rule the world, declare war and to shelter the earth, so that nobility shall not perish from its face.
Although Abraham Lincoln was right to observe that it would be surprising if a man over six foot tall did not know that he towered over his fellow creatures, one might nevertheless wonder whether a declaration that one stands at the top of the order of rank is not evidence that one has just slipped from it. Perhaps the aristocratic or offensive tone of Ecce Homo, so unlike Lincoln’s, is to be excused by the fact that the crisis in the history of mankind might be something to get excited about. It is to Nietzsche’s
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credit that although at times the Antichrist verges on the harsh, Ecce Homo on the earnest, and both on the anxious, they are never dour. In the midst of what he regarded as the crisis of man Nietzsche kept his wit and wits about him.
Nietzsche’s teaching of the natural order of rank, or as it was later and earlier called “natural right”, has other political consequences. Nietzsche was pleased when Georg Brandes called him “a radical conservative”, which does not quite mean atheistical conservative, for Dionysius is a god. The best regime is the regime that most accords with the natural order of rank; in it the better will rule the mediocre and the best will rule the better. Every great country or culture is a pyramid with fewer and fewer men towards the top and broad bases of competent mediocrity below (A. 57). It goes without saying that Nietzsche is quite ready to countenance slavery (JGB, 257, 242, 239). Nietzsche also does not object to the tyranny of a Caesar or a Napoleon and even calls for the tyranny of a philosopher of the future (JGB, 262, 242). Because he appreciated how much breeding goes into the raising of fine human beings, how early education begins and how far it must go to encourage the young to climb the ladder of rank, Nietzsche favors settled aristocracies, aristocracies of birth (JGB, 257, 262); his sense of the noble is Vornehm rather than Edel (JGB, IX). Although he himself favored small cities, provincial sites, and a mountain village in the Swiss confederation for his work (EH, II, 2), he esteemed Empires over Republics, the world-commanding Roman Empire over the overcoming Roman Republic. Arcaded Turin, the small capital of the Savoy that united all Italy, delighted him almost unspeakably, for it united what he favored with what he esteemed. 4 In Nietzsche’s laudation of Imperial Rome there is no praise of the mixed regime that the moderate Polybius esteemed and that the clever Machiavelli said was the secret of its conquests. Nietzsche hated the plebs as much as Coriolanus. He was not, like Tocqueville, ready to bow to equality. Everything democratic, which to him means indelicate, vulgar, commercial, gold-rushed, grossly obvious, logical, leveling, ignoble and shameless, he scorned (MA, 472; FW, 329; GD, X, 39; JGB 242). He has nothing good to say about the rule of law, parliaments, parties or votes. He knew democratic wars would be bloodier than any previous ones (FW, 362; JGB, 208). The political ways of the English-speaking peoples their mixed regimes, bills of rights, trial by jury, respect for due process, and their tendency to reform rather than revolutionize seemed to him weaknesses (JGB, 252; MA, 472). This has little to do with the fact that Nietzsche had never visited these lands, as Tocqueville did, met and consequently judged them by their scholars and writers. No, the statesmen who have enriched the English-speaking peoples, risen above their regime if you like, certainly above their writers, were invisible to Nietzsche. So far as I know, Nietzsche never mentions Halifax, Marlborough, Pitt Hamilton, Madison or Lincoln. In the greatest poet of the English-speaking people, Shakespeare. Nietzsche did recognize something great, but the presence of the Falstaffian next to the noble in Shakespeare made Nietzsche suffer rather than smile (EH, 111, 4).5 In poetry and in the soul, as well as in the nation, the mixed regime was alien to him.
These consequences, as he saw them, of a sense of the natural order of rank challenge those who share his indebtedness to the ancients (GD, Xl) to ask themselves whether or in what degree and what way they might pledge their allegiance to America. The current world situation Nietzsche would certainly see as a struggle for planetary rule between democratic America and socialist Russia (JGB, 208) Europe having lost its nobler chance twice. In which of these powers would he see a new nobility arising? Which side, if any would he support? Which would he expect to win? Perhaps in the Blessed Isles on their walks, he and Socrates discuss such questions.
2. Nietzsche’s Way to Nature (1028 words)
The foregoing account of Nietzsche’s understanding of nature followed Nietzsche’s emphasis on the misinterpretations of nature; it treated them so as to arrive at his own account; in the midst of his loud noes it tried to hear his quiet yeses. It is time to ask why Nietzsche’s emphasis is as it is. After all, others have written of nature directly and unpolemically. He chose not to. Why? There seem to be seven reasons.
(1) Nietzsche wanted to benefit his readers. Most readers will be under the sway of various errors about nature. Nietzsche must begin where they are, not where he is. Their minds must be liberated before he can begin to instruct them. The bigger and more powerful the error, the more Nietzsche must strive against it. Education means the low claims more attention from a higher man than it naturally deserves; this injustice is justified when such attention to the low is for the sake of the elevation of the lower (Z I, Vorrede and end).
(2) Nietzsche “goes down” to men and their many errors because it is philosophic to do so. The noble that knows the base is more philosophic than the merely noble. Love of knowledge is more noble than nobility. The exceptional man, the philosopher, will find the rule more interesting than himself (JGB, 26). Self-education requires attention to the base. This injustice is justified when it is for the sake of the high itself. That is, it is not unjust .
(3) Nietzsche wished not only to be understood and to understand, but to not be understood (JGB, 290; GD, X, 26;FW, 381). If one says what one
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does not think, few will ask what one thinks. If one says what one does not think loudly, almost no one will inquire what one does think. Nietzsche wanted to stand as alone as possible. lt is more courageous to do so to fight alone without allies or friends (EH, Wise 7). It is also more solitary. One should not want to share what is most one’s own. Courage and solitude are two of the virtues Nietzsche praises most. By taking on all errors and accepting no allies in his war, Nietzsche exhibits at least two of the virtues that crown the natural order of rank (JGB, 284). No account of nature and the natural order of rank that does not embody this order can have worth. The virtues being somewhat inconspicuous (FW, 336), one’s own virtues should be somewhat inconspicuous. The best readers are attracted by what is conspicuously inconspicuous.
(4) It is not only true that most readers are swayed by errors but that these errors now pose an unprecedented threat to man. Nature is more vulnerable than anyone ever thought. Speak now lest no one have a chance to speak later. You should oppose errors not only vehemently but with such color, wit and intellectual exuberance that you excite those apt to become the philosophers of the future and annihilate those inapt. You are going to errors, remember your wits.
(5) Nietzsche writes exotericly (JGB, 30, 40). His outside is explosive, polemical, earnest and destructive, his inside is gay, tender, jubilant and golden. Whereas ancient thinkers may have hidden their most dangerous thoughts, Nietzsche hides his most joyous. With him the distinction between esoteric and exoteric is not so much a distinction between inside and outside or reality and appearance, as it is between high and low. What is noble is rare, solitary, hard to perceive if you don’t have it, if you are not it. In his works prior to Zarathustra Nietzsche was working toward it; in those after he helps others to it. Nietzsche’s esotericism accords with nature as he understands it. The low cannot really appreciate the high. The high must tyrannize the low but at its own highest point must affirm the eternal return of the low, including the low reader.
(6) Nietzsche understood that for man nature is a difficult matter. There are always more errors than truth. Nature would not have it otherwise. Man is on the one hand the unfixed, hence least natural animal (JGB, 62), and yet most an image of the overcoming character of nature (Z II, 12). Man becomes who he is through the virtues. The order of rank is like a ladder man climbs by becoming it. It is like a ladder because it is there, not imagined. It is also as if man makes himself into such a ladder because the virtues can only be acquired not given. The higher up the ladder the more you see them only by possessing them, to the point where you may even have one long before you recognize it (JGB, 249; FW, 8). There may even be a day in one’s life when all ones vices turn into virtues (JGB, 116).
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(7) Like man, like reader. The reader too is on the way to what he is. Nietzsche’s loud noes liberate him from the bondage of error, but the ascent of the order of rank in the text must be accomplished with less and less help: clear criticisms should be followed by moderate tones, tapering off to enigmatic whispers. The reader must learn how to read. Teach him much the way enigmatic nature teaches man (Z 1, 7). As nature wants man to overcome much, so does Nietzsche, including even himself perhaps.
If so, then I was right to say, as I began, that by following Nietzsche’s emphasis on what nature is not, one learns about nature; Nietzsche’s overcoming of misinterpretations so as to reach the right one is an imitation of nature. It is also a part of nature, for to sum up our summary, in three words: phusis loves Geist.
But if so, what excuse can there be for the summary above, since it proceeded without the presentation of the interpretation of the passages upon which it was based, whose wit, nobility and gay colors it so laundered out?
Only this: that it might encourage one to study and restudy these passages and all that surrounds them. 6
3. Modems, Ancients, and Nietzsche (3360 words)
How difficult it is to read Nietzsche and to see what he means by an order of rank is evident if we turn to the last three parts of Götzen-Dammerung (Twilight of the Idols). However difficult, they are easier to read than other parts in Nietzsche. One reason they are is that their theme, nature and an order of rank, allows them to stand somewhat free from the largely polemical, de-constructing and destructive parts that precede them and from the whole book that they bring to a high close.
The first of these three parts, entitled “Streifzuge eines Unzeitgemassen” (“Skirmishes of the Untimely One”), consists of fifty-one aphorisms, most of them about ten sentences long, although one (#17) is only a sentence long and another (#37) is three times longer than the average. Some have headings; some, a minority, do not. These skirmishes deal with an extraordinary variety of topics: George Eliot, the most spiritual human beings, philosophers as deaf-mutes, diet, complaining, Caesar Borgia, a whisper to conservatives, and the nature of aphorisms (#51). Although each is well written, the whole seems to be miscellaneous and unordered, not disordered but causal, certainly far more causal than the number of these paragraphs suggests. Why exactly fifty-one? One feels Nietzsche could skirmish, comment or complain, and aphor quite a bit more and maybe should have less. Perhaps it is best to take to heart only the remarks that strike one and let the rest, in their order or disorder, take care of themselves. A bike ride in the country is sometimes better than a guided tour of a town; the
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diverse and ondoyant M. Montaigne more thoughtful than the instructive Mr. Addison; and Herr Nietzsche more exciting than Voltaire.
If so, then the next part, “Was ich den Alten verdanke” (“What I owe to the Ancients”), will disappoint us. Here the variety of material is subordinated to a unifying theme, the ancients. Nietzsche thanks the ancients for their virtues; he even thanks them for his. Here, too, there is also a kind of ascent from flighty Plato, whom Nietzsche mistrusts, to sober Thucydides, whom Nietzsche reveres, on to intoxicated Dionysus, whom Nietzsche celebrates. Tone and tempo ascend from Roman compactness to Zarathustrian fervor. The prose of this part prepares for the poetry of the next and final section, “Der hammer Redet” (“The Hammer Speaks”), a long quotation from Zarathustra III, “Von alten und neuen Tafeln” (“Of old and new tablets”) #29 Still the transition from fifty-one scattered and excited paragraphs, to an ordered essay, and then on to the dithyrambic finish may well leave the reader more irritated than moved. Why such changes of style and tempo? Is this not the music of decadence, a regular satura Menippea? Why so excited? And why so garrulous? Are not these remarks “divorced from the natural movements of speech”? They may shock or amuse, stun or irritate, awe or enrage but have not the power to clarify, to instruct, or to educate. 7 They seem to lead nowhere. And readers who cannot forget that Nietzsche went mad three months later may well mutter “incipient megalomania.”
As if he knew how difficult it is to read him, Nietzsche offers instruction in these very parts. In paragraph #51 of “Skirmishes” we read:
… To create things on which time tests its teeth in vain; in form, in substance, to strive for a little immortality—I have never yet been modest enough to demand less of myself. The aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the first among the Germans to be a master, are the forms of “eternity”; it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book.
Most of these “skirmishes,” as we noted, are about ten sentences long. Each of them strives to express what others might say in a book. The time, concentration and inquiry that others might devote to some matter Nietzsche has put into each one of these skirmishes. Surely it will require something like the same effort to understand each one, indeed more, since they are more concentrated. Many of these skirmishes are against men Nietzsche knows through their books. What they have written in a book he expresses in an aphorism. What is more, he expresses more than they did. He says what they would not or could not say in their book. He ferrets out their secret, whether they know it or not. He completes the train of thought they broke
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off. Where they halted, he goes on. He understands them better than they understand themselves.
This instruction is continued in the next part, on the “Ancients.” In the epigram and in Sallust, school boy Nietzsche discovered himself:
..My sense of style, for the epigram as a style, was awakened almost instantly when I came into contact with Sallust. I have not forgotten the surprise of my honored teacher, Corssen, when he had to give his worst Latin pupil the best grade: I had finished with one stroke. Compact, severe, with as much substance as possible, a cold sarcasm against ‘”beautiful words” and “beautiful sentiments ” – here I found myself.
The theme of hardness, as something that is difficult, that is noble, and that lasts beyond the ”times” is given its “hardest” formulation in the poem that ends the book:
For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax,
Blessedness to write on the will of the millennia as on bronze – harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether hard.
This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: become hard!
Nietzsche not only knew he was hard to read, he meant to be. For the reader the practical consequence of such a style is spelled out, in this next to last part, in a remark on Thucydides (Section 2):
…. One must follow him line by line and read no less clearly between the lines: there are few thinkers who say so much between the lines.
It seems reasonable to suppose Nietzsche counted himself another such thinker who must be read this way.
With this in mind, let us make another start.
We notice that Nietzsche is in the title of both ”Skirmishes” and “Ancients”; he is the untimely man skirmishing in the first and he is the man who thanks the ancients in the second. Finally, he is the author of Zarathustra’s poem which conclude the book. Is Nietzsche untimely because he has much to thank the ancients for, or perhaps, because of Zarathustra? Did meeting Zarathustra make Nietzsche “untimely,” out of joint with his times? Against whom or what does this untimely Nietzsche skirmish? A survey of the “Skirmishes” shows them to be almost wholly against moderns, the majority of them belonging to Nietzsche’s own time, roughly from the French Revolution to his own adult years, the decades in which Bismarck
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united Germany as a Reich and the other European nations acquired or expanded their empires. Nietzsche’s “Skirmishes” are then against his times, modern times, modern post-revolutionary times and against various figures who characterize these times. Indeed, “Skirmishes” and “Ancients” seem to be related as “Ancients and Moderns” or rather as “Moderns and Ancients.” They are arranged as an ascent from modern Europe to ancient Greece, an ascent to the past, to the Ancients, and then a further step, to the future, to Zarathustra. Between the modern Europeans and the Greeks stands Christianity. Christianity, which is treated in both parts, is criticized more severely than anything else. It is what must be overcome, in order to ascend from modern Europe to the Greeks. Whereas Nietzsche skirmishes with modern Europeans, he makes war upon Christianity. ft8 The ancients he thanks and Zarathustra he hails.
To what avail is all free-spiritedness, modernity, mockery and wry-neck suppleness, if in one’s guts one is still a Christian, a Catholic in fact a priest !
declares Nietzsche at the beginning of his skirmishes (#2). Modern times, the times against which Nietzsche skirmishes, are characterized by Christian morals without the Christian God (#5). The results can be as different as the moralism of George Eliot or the pessimism of Schopenhauer (#21—22; 37—38). But as Nietzsche (#5) and Pascal (#9) know: you cannot have Christian morals without the Christian God. And without the stern Christian God the antinatural character of Christian morals will impoverish man. The weakest, that is, most weakened and weakening, expression of these morals appears among the English: in George Eliot (#5), Carlyle (#12), and, above all, in Darwin (#14). Following Malthus, Darwin thinks of nature as poor, niggardly and weak. “A struggle for mere existence” is precisely how the weak, who are the majority, think of nature. Only if nature is rich and if it is a struggle for power can one hope for the appearance of stronger exceptions, the few (#14). However, the most powerful or active expression of modern decay appears on the continent, in the thirst for equality that glowed in Rousseau, ignited the French Revolution, and smolders on in socialism. At bottom this thirst for equality springs from envy of the stronger natures and from resentment against nature itself, which is not equal, flat, free and democratic, but prodigal, rich, hard and ordered, with ranks and tiers, or in a word, just and aristocratic (#48).
Opposing this sea of weakness and resentment two figures took arms: Napoleon (#44, 45, 49) and Goethe (#16, 21,48–51). Napoleon gave the Revolution a whiff of grapeshot, sublimated its envy into emulation and transformed its thirst for equality into longing for glory. He came from an
older country. He was a piece of nature, not the nature Rousseau would have us return to but the nature Nietzsche would ascend to: something clean and hard, like the convicts Dostoevsky met in Siberia, and something on occasion harsh, like the nature the Renaissance recognized in Caesar Borgia.
Goethe was of the same mind as Napoleon. He abhorred the Revolution and respected Napoleon. ft9 Although he was born with many modern weaknesses, he disciplined himself. He overcame everything Rousseauistic. He created himself. According to Nietzsche:
… Goethe conceived a human being who would be strong: highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom; the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength, because he knows how to use to his advantage, even that from which the average nature would perish; the man for whom there is no longer anything that is forbidden—unless it be weakness, whether called vice or virtue.
Moreover, Goethe opposed not only Christian morals but, so Nietzsche claims, the Christian God; “we understand each other about the ‘cross'” (#51).1° Nietzsche goes even further. Goethe is virtually an Ancient:
Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathsome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole—he does not negate any more. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: l have baptized it with the name of Dionysus.
Yet when we go on from “Skirmishes” to “Ancients” (#4) we find Nietzsche asserting of Goethe:
We have quite a different feeling when we examine the concept “Greek’ which was developed by Winckelman and Goethe, and find it incompatible with that element out of which Dionysian art grows—the orgiastic. Indeed I do not doubt that as a matter of principle Goethe excluded anything of the sort from the possibilities of the Greek soul. Consequently Goethe did not understand the Creeks.
Is this a contradiction? Just the sort of thing you expect of disorderly aphorists? Every aphorism pointed and sparkling but the whole incoherent, a heap however glittering? No discipline?
I think not. The later section corrects the earlier. While Nietzsche is
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skirmishing with this time, with modernity, he is so delighted to discover something noble, another “untimely” man like himself, that he momentarily over-estimates the man’s nobility, even attributes his own nobility to him. This “mistake” is a consequence of Nietzsche’s taking us up an order of rank. As we stand at the bottom of a long ladder only the initial rungs are distinct; the higher we look the harder it is for us to distinguish the rungs. Viewed from the plains of modernity Goethe shines like a peak disappearing into the clouds. Only as we ascend do we begin to see peaks beyond him. When we reach classical ground, in the next section, Goethe is not the top at all. Among the ancients he ranks with Aristotle perhaps, since neither understood tragedy. Now looking down from the ancients this modern even seems to become indistinguishable from his inferior, Winckelman. If you look down from the top of a very long ladder, the first rungs and even the middle ones become indistinguishable. A g-triad in the key of C major will be consonant but express an unstable tension in C sharp minor.
What is above Goethe? What are those higher rungs? Not Plato, Nietzsche tells us. Plato is decadent, boring, and even idealistic. Nietzsche prefers the hardness of the Romans. His “cure” for Plato is Thucydides who, like Machiavelli, will not be gulled about nature (#2):
… Thucydides: the great sum, the last revelation of that strong, severe, hard factuality which was instinctive with the older Hellenes. In the end, it is courage in the face of reality that distinguishes a man like Thucydides from Plato: Plato is a coward before reality, consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has control of himself, consequently he also maintains control of things.
As the reference to Renaissance Machiavelli in his portrait of Thucydides indicates, Goethe and Thucydides belong at about the same level. Only Goethe’s too serene view of “the Greeks” demotes him. Yet Thucydides too is not the top of the order of rank; only Dionysus is:
… For it is only in the Dionysian mysteries~ in the psychology of the Dionysian state, that the basic fact of the Hellenic instinct finds expression—its “will to life.” What was it that the Hellene guaranteed himself by means of these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal return of life; the future promised and hallowed in the past; the triumphant Yes to life beyond all death and change; true life as the over-all continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality. For the Greeks the sexual symbol was therefore the venerable symbol par excellence, the real profundity in the whole of ancient piety. Every single element in the act of procreation, of pregnancy, and of birth aroused the highest and
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most solemn feelings. In the doctrine of the mysteries, pain is pronounced holy: the pangs of the woman giving birth hallow all pain; all becoming and growing — all that guarantees a future involves pain. That there may be the eternal joy of creating, that the will to life may eternally affirm itself, the agony of the woman giving birth must also be there eternally.
At the top then is the man who affirms life. As the end of this passage affirms, such affirmation is utterly opposed to Christianity. The next section (#5) names this affirmation as tragic:
… Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems~ the will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility even in the very sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to be liberated from terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge – Aristotle understood it that way – but in order to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity—that joy which included even joy in destroying.
It seems then that the highest man is the tragic poet and Dionysus, the tragic god, is life treated as divine, eternal living deified. Who is this tragic poet? The final section answers by quoting from this poet’s tragedy, from Zarathustra III, a passage on the hammer speaking.
That the order of rank displayed in these two last sections of Götzen Dammerung (Twilight of the Idols) is not just an order of rank, but the order of rank is amply shown by the decisive part nature plays in the ranking. Christian morality is simply antinatural; modern morality, a decadent form of Christian morality, is a revenge against nature, Rousseau its most influential spokesman. Napoleon was a realist; so was Goethe. Goethe in addition knew who his enemies were. Thucydides was a realist without a trace of distorting nostalgia. The great tragedians, pupils of the philosopher Dionysus, were in addition, affirmers of suffering, not just courageous in the face of nature but joyous. Nature is birth, procreation and death, and nature is, in its highest rung, the man who affirms these joyously. Judging from the way Nietzsche makes the Greeks so singularly virtuous, one might well wonder whether any modern man can attain to their nobility. Perhaps nature once was but is not possible any more. Perhaps it is now hidden. To answer this doubt Nietzsche concludes with a citation from Zarathustra. However, since Zarathustra belongs to the future and may, after all, be “only poetry,” Nietzsche includes in his section on the moderns a simple account of the right sort of death. In “Skirmishes” (#36) we read:
To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right time, brightly and cheerfully accomplished amid children and witnesses: then a real farewell is still possible, as the one who is taking leave is still there; also a real estimate of what one has achieved and what one has wished, drawing the sum of one’s life….
The inclusion of such a death in Nietzsche’s modern section shows that although Nietzsche was an historian he was not an historicist. What the order of rank was, it will be, and is.
In summary then: although Nietzsche foresaw that the “death of God’ would lead to nihilism, he saw it might also lead to the rediscovery of nature. Men who lose an authoritative truth will be tempted to believe there are no truths. There are.
Nihilists have long found Nietzsche interesting. Is he responsible? Great books can have bad consequences. For bad men surely. (Certainly deconstruction is a philosophy for the Last Man.) And also for good men as well, since great books are hard to read. Certainly Nietzsche’s are hard. We must also acknowledge that an author is responsible for a likely misreading of his works. Is nihilism a likely misreading of Nietzsche? Certain it is that most nihilist readers of Nietzsche have got more encouragement from what Nietzsche did not publish than from what he did: the notes he neither perfected nor destroyed which his sister arranged as Will-to-Power. For such readers Nietzsche is surely far less responsible than the creative God is said to be responsible for evil.
Although nature is close to us, indeed in us, its truth is far from us and hard for us to reach. According to Nietzsche, there is no way to nature but by saying nay to opinion, especially anti-natural opinion. Perhaps it is for this reason that in Nietzsche the death of God leads to the dying god, be he Dionysus or Zarathustra; this might suggest that nature has been Christianized by Nietzsche, Dionysus being the closest thing in Greek religion to Christ. Certain it is that nature in Nietzsche is to be worshipped. To reach nature men must worship it. Nietzsche’s paganism, however, differs from the Greeks’, for it knows no Olympic gods. Likewise his Christ in The Antichrist knows no Father in Heaven.’
Put in:
N’s remark, in a letter to Overbeck— that when Lou said she was immoral, or had no morality, he thought that she, like him, had a more severe morality.
Notes
1 Throughout I have used the German abbreviations of Nietzsche’s works employed in the Colli/Montinari Kritische Studienausgabe ~Berlin: DTV and de Gruyter, 1980). All translations are those of Walter Kaufmann, with some modifications, here and there, to bring out something pertinent to my interpretation. No translation, however fine, is able in every instance to express all in the original.
2. Nietzsche’s sense of tragic virtue embraces the following: that allegiance to perishable life requires it, that a philosopher’s living with non-philosophers, “going down” to them, is a tragedy, and that truth and life may be entirely at odds. That there may be a choice between the good and noble, he recognizes, but does not regard as tragic. That parts of the noble can be at odds with each other, that the virtues can be in conflict, he does not seem to acknowledge.
3. In his essay on Nietzsche entitled “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” Interpretation, Vol. 3/2, 3 (Winter, 1973), Leo Strauss points out that in JGB, 284, Nietzsche substitutes compassion and solitude for justice and moderation in the Platonic-Socratic quartet of virtues; which also means, he retained wisdom and courage; that he did not throw out moderation and justice, only demoted them, is evident from GM, Ill, 8 and GD, X, 48; the reason for the demotion of moderation or self-control is given in FW, 305. Since Aquinas, and perhaps Smith, no one has, l think, taught more on the virtues than Nietzsche; since Montaigne, no one has attended more to friendship.
4. According to Dr. Simchowitz, Nietzsche once held forth eloquently on the characteristics of great and small cities . It was in the winter of ’89 shortly after his hospitalization. So, Dr.Simchowitz may have been the last person to receive one of those priceless gifts Nietzsche gives, a thought. Cited by Erich F. Podach Der kranke Nietzsche (Wien: Hermann-Fischer, 1937), pp. 233-234.
5. After “good,” “noble” and “sweet” are the two most frequent adjectives in Shakespeare; while alert and thrilled by the one, Nietzsche seems almost insensitive to the other; Shakespeare might regard him as Coriolanus become poet. Plato would characterize Nietzsche as thymos philosophizing.
6. Much of what I say here I think I learned from Leo Strauss and his account of Nietzsche; he might deny I learned much.
7. Here I adopt the language of Glenn Thurow’s criticism of the footnote style of George Anastaplo, “The Defense of Liberty,” Interpretation Vll (2/3), p. 202.
8. Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity becomes a denunciation in Der Antichrist (The Antichrist also The Antichristian); that the middle of the book is an ardent praise of Christ is but one of many signs of how complicated Nietzsche’s view of or relation to Christianity is. It would not be altogether misleading to characterize Zarathustra as a Christian God without Christian morals. And the Nietzsche of Ecce Homo as a crucified Christ without Christian morals. 2007–or a Christ who crucified himself
9. However much Goethe respected Napoleon, he refused his offer to come to Paris and write a Julius Caesar play to celebrate him.
10. Presumably Nietzsche thinks of Goethe’s Venetian Epigram #66.
11. A draft of this essay was presented to a Claremont Institute Panel on “Nietzsche’s Political Teaching” at the American Political Science Association convention in 1984. It was written in the rare library of Prof Dr. Heribert Boeder (Braunschweig) whose hospitality I recall with pleasure and acknowledgewith thanks. It was begun on an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship.
[1] Throughout I have used the German abbreviations of Nietzsche’s works employed in the Colli/Montinari Kritische Studienausgabe ~Berlin: DTV and de Gruyter, 1980). All translations are those of Walter Kaufmann, with some modifications, here and there, to bring out something pertinent to my interpretation. No translation, however fine, is able in every instance to express all in the original.
[2] Nietzsche’s sense of tragic virtue embraces the following: that allegiance to perishable life requires it, that a philosopher’s living with non-philosophers, “going down” to them, is a tragedy, and that truth and life may be entirely at odds. That there may be a choice between the good and noble, he recognizes, but does not regard as tragic. That parts of the noble can be at odds with each other, that the virtues can be in conflict, he does not seem to acknowledge.
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