GERMAN PESSIMISM (aka ‘Happy Times’)
In
the late 1700s and early 1800s, the time of Schopenhauer and just
before Nietzsche’s birth, Germany and German thought had been going
through a great period of pessimism. Just like in ancient Egypt, Greece
and China, human thought often flourishes in periods of tragedy and war
as people are forced to turn critically to old conceptions and
institutions and ask hard questions about what works and does not for
the individual and the community. In the late 1700s, the American and
French revolutions, along with developments in England, had brought new
rights to common people. When the German people rose up to fight for
rights similar to their neighbors, several German princes came together
to crush the popular people’s movement. Germany was at this time a
loose confederacy of regional principalities, ruled locally. Hegel’s
student Marx, German though writing much of his work in England, was
writing for this discouraged audience, arguing that the people would
rise up and overcome oppression.
Recall
that Descartes, Kant and other rationalists argued that the world
(Descartes) and/or the mind (Kant) worked like a clock that provides us
with mathematical and deductive certainties. When the political tide
turned against the German people, who sought a more reasonable society
like the American and French revolutions, the people began to wonder: Is
the world, society or mind run by reason? This created a tide of
pessimistic popular and intellectual culture. Remember that Socrates
(as Plato’s mouthpiece) in the Republic argued that the world is true
and created by ideal forms that can be known by the just and wise, but
Thrasymachus argued that justice was merely the will of the stronger who
could impose their ‘order’ on others. German thought likewise turned
from the reason of Kant towards the will of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
as the ordering force in the world. Since reason failed in the world,
the world is not a reasonable place but a tough place in which it is
hard to push for what one sees as beautiful and true. Life, at its
best, is romantic and dramatic, not rational or mathematical.
German
pessimism, including its famous thinkers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,
flourished in popularity during two more recent periods of pessimism:
WWI for Europe (producing the Dada modern art movement we will study
soon) and post-WWII through the Vietnam War for America (producing the
counter-culture of first the beatniks and then hippies, particularly
thriving in the Bay Area). Nietzsche has been celebrated by
counter-cultural thinkers and artists as a pessimist who trashed his own
country, culture and people as prideful and ignorant sheep who would
rather seek pride in being a member of a group than be excellent as
individuals.
SCHOPENHAUER (1788 - 1860)
Arthur
Schopenhauer, who looks something like a cross between a cranky
grandfather and Wolverine of the X Men, was a follower of Kant, unlike
his own follower Nietzsche who despised Kant and argued against him
frequently. Kant and Schopenhauer were both great influences on
Wittgenstein, who we will study next. Remember that Kant conceded to
Hume that the world is unknown and all we can have about it are
assumptions, but the mind works mathematically and so we can know the
categories of the mind with deductive certainty. Schopenhauer, more
pessimistic than Kant, saw the gulf and gap between the world and our
ideas as a stormy abyss that forever frustrates our idealizations. He
agreed with Kant that the mind works categorically and mathematically,
but the gap between our conceptions and the ‘thing-in-itself’ turned
Schopenhauer from Rationalism and mathematical science to Buddhism and
ecstatic art.
Remember
that Hegel disliked Kant’s gap between our ideas and the
‘thing-in-itself’ and believed that it could be overcome by reason
through dialectic. Schopenhauer disagreed with Hegel and argued that
reason could not overcome the gap. In fact, Schopenhauer and Hegel both
taught at the University of Berlin as philosophical rivals. As Hegel
became increasingly popular, Schopenhauer scheduled his lectures at the
same time as Hegel’s to try to combat his philosophy, but when this
backfired and more students attended Hegel’s lectures Schopenhauer
resigned in disgust. Schopenhauer openly called Hegel a charlatan who
tricks people into believing reason completely fleshes the world out,
and wrote that when he read Hegel’s central Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind
he felt as if he were in a madhouse.
Schopenhauer
was deeply influenced by Indian thought, specifically the Upanishads,
Vedanta and Buddhism. Of the Upanishads, he wrote that they were the
most sublime philosophy of world history, and that, “it has been the
consolation of my life and will be the consolation of my death”.
Schopenhauer saw parallels between the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha
and his own philosophy of existence as will and suffering. He wrote
that, if his own philosophy is correct, it is expected that it agrees
with the most popular system of thought in human history. He received
instruction in meditation, though it is unknown whether he practiced
with any regularity. Like much of Indian thought and Hume, who himself
may very well have been influenced by Indian sources, Schopenhauer
argued that thought is caused by will and desire, the fundamental
essence of all things.
Schopenhauer’s
great work is The World as Will and Representation. The mind
represents and idealizes the world, which is essentially will. All
things, including the self and conceptions, are manifestations of will.
Recall that Buddha taught that existence is suffering and the cause of
suffering is desire and attachment. For Schopenhauer, the world is full
of perpetual striving for ideals that never come to perfection. The
classic metaphor he uses is the ship bobbing on a stormy sea, a ship
build of ideals as straight boards on a sea of chaotic desires. One
must recognize one’s condition, and have the courage and will to hold
one’s course in spite of the endless hardship. Developing sea legs and a
tough stomach, to recognize oneself and one’s world as striving without
hope for a Hegelian resolution by reason, is virtue and true strength.
There
is for Schopenhauer one escape from will and the self. Through art,
which can include philosophy, we can temporarily escape ourselves and
our desires through ecstasy and identification with others and the
whole. Nietzsche similarly argued that creativity was the highest form
of life, but he argued that it was not the loss of self and escape from
will but rather the highest activity of the individual, expressing power
and accomplishment. For Schopenhauer, it is not standing out as an
individual but identification with the world beyond representation,
feeling unity with the other that transcends conceptualization.
Schopenhauer
considered music the highest form of art, the form that embodies pure
will itself, because unlike visual arts it represents and copies no
particular things or ideas. In this way it is similar to American
Abstract Minimalist painting and sculpture that became popular in the
wake of WWII and with the beatniks, art which goes beyond Cubism,
Futurism and Surrealism in representing no particular things but
striving to give shape to pure emotion and sensation.
Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche are quite similar to Darwin. Like Jains, but unlike
Descartes, Schopenhauer saw animals as intimately related to human
beings, both being similar manifestations of will, striving and
suffering. In one passage near the end of The World as Will and
Representation, Schopenhauer speaks of sea-lions and the way that they
form a circle around their young. Whenever a pup tries to escape the
circle, it gets a bite from the elders to teach it to stay where it is
safe. Clearly he is drawing a comparison between the way sea-lions and
humans learn through suffering and overcoming of will in themselves and
others. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were both influences on Freud, who
saw civilization and human behaviors as repression of desire and will,
as the super-ego putting the ego’s endless search for pleasure in check.
Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were critical of philosophy for
avoiding subjects such as sex, laughter and friendship because this raw
material of life, the most vibrant forms of will, defies most powerfully
conceptualization and categorization.
NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)
Nietzsche
is often called the first modern thinker. In fact, depending on
whether you say we live in modern or post-modern times, he is called the
first modern OR post-modern thinker. Descartes is also called the
first modern thinker, but truthfully he was the first modern European
thinker, and Europe is being identified with modernity. Nietzsche is
without doubt one of the most influential philosophers of modern Europe,
and most skeptical thought is now deeply in his debt. He argued, like
Descartes, that everything must be questioned, but unlike Descartes he
argued against the certainty of religion, science and politics. For
Nietzsche, truth is an individual quest that should not be put in
servitude to an institution. Because human beings are easily made into
sheep, the excellent must strive to overcome both themselves and
institutions to bring greater truth to the world and greater meaning to
their own lives.
Nietzsche
came from a long line of protestant Lutheran preachers, five
generations deep (following his great-great-great-grandfather, thrice
times great like Hermes Trismegistus, the author of the Hermetic Corpus
of Neo-Platonism). Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s father died when he was
very little, suffering both physically and mentally. Nietzsche as a
boy wondered why both his father, a passionate preacher, and older
brother died in spite of being Christian. Though his family sent the
boy to school to become a preacher and theologian, like Hegel, Heidegger
and many other German thinkers Nietzsche rebelled and turned to
philosophy (after a brief period of turning to mathematics). It seems
that many great philosophers of Europe begin by studying religion or
science (particularly mathematics) and then turning to philosophy to
seek the rules of the rules, the deeper understanding of human
understandings.
Nietzsche versus Morality
The
text I gave you to read is ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, in which Nietzsche
asks us to look at humanity and systems of thought critically and see
that following the rules (the rationalist morality of Kant) or ‘the
greater common good’ (the utilitarian morality of Mill) is for sheep and
not for the genuine individual. The individual rises above the masses
and sees things in a new way. Nietzsche came up with these ideas
reading Kant and Mill, reacting against their overall goods for everyone
evenly. For Nietzsche, inequality and individuality is the beautiful
mountain range for each individual to climb and conquer.
Nietzsche
was a staunch individualist, believing that ANY group morality is a
slave morality that limits the individual, and he called Christianity,
scientific ‘objectivity’, German nationalism and German racism (very
much centered in anti-semitism) out on this vocally. These are all the
systems that Germans of his day identified with. Nietzsche was possibly
the first to openly call all the group identities and institutions of
his day foolish. He is seen as a hero by many for this. Consider that
in one place he wrote, “When we create the master race, we will have to
mix in a lot of Jews to get their good qualities”, a joke considering
that Nietzsche would never advise creating a master race of equals, a
growing subject of his day that reached its peak in the Nazi regime, but
rather loves the individual who stands above the race as a herd.
Nietzsche
argued that in any system, the revered leaders always have the strength
and individuality to criticize the system. Unfortunately, then the
individual’s thought becomes canon and dogma, and the process repeats as
Hegel recognized in each stage of history. Nietzsche praised Jesus as
an individual who criticized the religious and political system of his
day, standing up to the Pharisees and the Romans, but Nietzsche bashes
Paul and Christianity for systematizing Jesus’ thought and actions,
making them constraints on the individual. In his Genealogy of Morals,
Nietzsche calls Paul the penultimate priest, the individual who takes
their own inability and imposes it on others.
It
is often noted that Nietzsche was a critic of religion and
Christianity. In two places, he famously says that God is dead, and you
and I have killed him. This is not, however, confined to religion. By
the ‘death of God’, Nietzsche was equally critical of any authority, of
any singular interpretation of truth, whether in the name of religion,
science, philosophy, race or politics (the first four often serving the
last). One of the fundamental thoughts of Nietzsche is that truth is
always individual interpretation, and that all philosophy and thought
are a self-confession of their author. To accept any human truth
passively, whether religious, scientific, academic, or political, is to
compromise one’s individuality, one’s ability to create greater meaning
and truth.
Like
Heraclitus, the ancient Greek thinker Nietzsche loved most, the world
is unknown beyond any human attempt to understand it by experts, making
us little more than apes (a metaphor used by both Heraclitus and
Nietzsche). The great individuals, those who form the systems
themselves, are those who both support and oppose the system to create
something new. Consider that if you believe Newton and his ‘laws’ are
entirely correct and certain fact, you would not be Einstein and invent
the Theory of Relativity. In one passage I take dear to heart,
Nietzsche warns us: If you thought religion created problems and mislead
people by offering them an identity that embraces some while rejecting
others, wait until you see how this can be done in the name of science
and the modern nation-state.
It
was a shame that Nietzsche was censored and used by the Nazis, thanks
to the efforts of Nietzsche’s sister, to support their ideas of the
rising German will of the master race, taking Nietzsche’s individualism
and twisting it into a racial and social doctrine. Nietzsche intended
his words for individualists, as he says over and over again, and he
attacked both nationalism and racism as poisons that intoxicate the
weak-minded. Nietzsche does speak of the superman, the ‘ubermensch’,
much as the Nazis called themselves the supermen and other races the
inferior, the under-men or sub-human (‘untermensch’). When Nietzsche
uses the term ‘ubermensch’, he means the one who overcomes both
themselves and their own culture, not those who embrace group identity
to give meaning to their lives. Nietzsche’s superior person is the
visionary thinker or artist, not a nation or race. Nietzsche called
himself an ‘anti-anti-semite’, and moved to Switzerland and renounced
his German citizenship to walk alone in the mountains.
Nietzsche versus Nihilism
While
many would say ‘Nietzsche believes in nothing, then”, this would not be
true. Nietzsche was just as vocal about believing in something as he
was about not believing the herd mentality. Nietzsche saw himself as a
new sort of thinker who would be followed and imitated by many. Indeed,
he predicted excellent individual thinkers (such as Bataille, Foucault,
Derrida) as well as corrupters (such as the Nazis) following in his
wake. Because of this, he warns over and over again NOT to make his
thought into a school or a system. However, he did not believe like
Schopenhauer that one could escape individuality and will. Nietzsche
believed that the whole worth of the individual is that, in the face of
nothing being absolutely true, staring into the void of being, you
create something and stand for something in a beautiful way, creating
your own meaning in life. He was very critical of ‘Nihilism’, believing
in nothing, though this is just what his critics, religious and not,
have often called him.
Nietzsche
believes in Heraclitus and Hegel’s Becoming between Being and
Non-Being. He avoids believing in eternal positives, but also avoids
believing in nothing whatsoever. It is the overturning of the old into
the new by the true individual who wills something created beyond
themselves and the world that stands in the face of nihilism, the
nihilism that Nietzsche sees as modernity’s greatest threat. He fears a
world where everyone sits on their couch, believes in nothing but is
afraid to contradict the state or church and do SOMETHING other than sit
there. Thus, Nietzsche relentlessly bashes reason and judgment in
himself and in others, but he believes that you must have the courage to
create. As the Nietzschean founder of the Dada art movement Tristan
Tzara wrote, “One must have the courage to be both for and against
thought”.
Nietzsche versus Women
One
of the most beautiful and deep parts of Nietzsche’s writings, a
particularly interesting example of his philosophical method, is his
sudden and unexpected turn in his book Human All Too Human from bashing
Kant and others for believing in objective truth to saying, “Here are
some of my truths”, and without warning begin trashing women, including
the famous line, “When you go to woman, do not forget your whip”. Why
is Nietzsche suddenly misogynistic? He has told us that philosophy is a
self-confession of the author, and that truth is always open to
interpretation. Nietzsche is putting on a self-conscious philosophical
performance, inspiring to many including Bataille and Derrida.
Nietzsche here is showing us both sides of himself at once, both his
hatred of women and his understanding that this is merely his own
twisted perspective. Unlike other philosophers, who write what they
hope can be consistent and clear truth, Nietzsche knows the truth is
psychological, contradictory and complex, and that beauty and
achievement come from tension and pain. Thus, even in his bashing he
knows he is a human being and flawed.
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
Nietzsche’s
first book was The Birth of Tragedy, in which he argued that the
ancient Greeks were not simply rationalists as was often said in
Nietzsche’s time and still is today. He argued that there were two
opposite strains in Greek society, the Apollonian (order, reason and
law) and the Dionysian (chaos, emotion and revolt). Apollo was the
ancient Greek god of knowledge, and Dionysus was the god of ecstasy,
intoxication and transformation. Nietzsche suggests that this is quite
human, and societies that develop do not simply become reasonable but
struggle to both restrain and escape restraint, to categorically
understand and transcend categorical understanding, engaging in both
science and art. This is very similar to Hegel’s dialectic of
understanding versus reason and culture versus counter-culture we
studied last time. However, unlike Hegel and following Schopenhauer’s
criticism of Hegel, Nietzsche identifies the opposite of understanding
not as reason but will, not as mathematical science but as creative
expression. This became influential on the philosopher Bataille, who
argued that systems of meaning, knowledge and economics are not simply
systems of containing and maintaining things but also of release and
excess.
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
In
this book, Nietzsche attempts to push thought beyond categorical
understandings of good and evil and of true and false to show the
complexity of human meaning and life. He starts this work asking: Why
do we want simple truth or suppose we can simply get truth? Philosophy
seems like it has barely started, but it has been assumed that something
in us wants absolute truth and can acquire it. Nietzsche says that
asking this question is perhaps the greatest risk. If we question our
ability to gain truth, it becomes possible that we will lose all hope
for truth and turn to nihilism, which Nietzsche argues later is equally
as dangerous to human creativity and the process of life as the belief
in objectivity. Typically, thinkers have assumed that there must be
absolute pure truth apart from or hidden within the messy world and
various human opinions. He writes:
“This
way of judging constitutes the typical prejudgment and prejudice which
gives away the metaphysicians of all ages; this kind of valuation looms
in the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of
this ‘faith’ that they trouble themselves about ‘knowledge’, about
something that is finally baptized solemnly as ‘the truth’. The
fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values.
It has not even occurred to the most cautious among them that one
might have a doubt right here at the threshold where it was surely most
necessary...For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at
all, and secondly whether these popular valuations and opposite values
on which the metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps merely
foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from
some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as it were, to borrow
an expression painters use. For all the value that the true, the
truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a
higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to
deception, selfishness, and lust. It might even be possible that what
constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that
they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked,
seemingly opposite things, maybe even one with them in essence. Maybe!”
(BGE 2)
Note
the ‘frog perspectives’ in their nooks, used by painters, is possibly
from the Daoist Zhuangzi. Later, Nietzsche uses the term ‘well-frogs’
similarly. European painting was influenced in the Renaissance and
later Enlightenment by Chinese landscape paintings.
“After
having looked long enough between the philosopher’s lines and fingers, I
say to myself: by far the greater part of conscious thinking must still
be included among instinctive activities, and that goes even for
philosophical thinking...most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher
is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts.
Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there
stand valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the
preservation of a certain type of life, for example, that the definite
should be worth more than the indefinite, and mere appearance worth less
than ‘truth’... (BGE 3)
“The
falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a
judgment...The question is to what extent is it life-promoting,
life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating,
and we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments
(which include the synthetic judgments apriori) are the most
indispensable for us, that without accepting the fictions of logic,
without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the
unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of
the world by means of numbers, man could not live, that renouncing false
judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. To
recognize untruth as a condition of life, that certainly means resisting
accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way, and a philosophy that
risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.”
(BGE 4)
Notice Nietzsche calling Kant out on apriori truth as a fiction, as well as the title of the work stated here.
“What
provokes one to look at all philosophers half suspiciously, half
mockingly, is not that one discovers again and again how innocent they
are, how often and how easily they make mistakes and go astray, in
short, their childishness and childlikeness, but that they are not
honest enough in their work, although they all make a lot of virtuous
noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They
all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions
through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned
dialectic (as opposed to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest
and doltish, and talk of ‘inspiration’), while at bottom it is an
assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of ‘inspiration’, most often a desire
of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract, that they defend
with reasons they have sought after the fact. They are all advocates
who resent that name, and for the most part even wily spokesmen for
their prejudices which they baptize ‘truths’, and very far from having
the courage of the conscience that admits this, precisely this, to
itself, very far from having the good taste of the courage which also
lets this be known, whether to warn an enemy or friend, or, from
exuberance, to mock itself. The equally stiff and decorous tartuffery
of the old Kant as he lures us on the dialectical bypaths that lead to
his ‘categorical imperative’ really lead astray and seduce, this
spectacle makes us smile, as we are fastidious and finds it quite
amusing to watch closely the subtle tricks of old moralists...” (BGE 5)
Notice
Nietzsche calling the dialectic of Kant and Hegel, the two big names in
German thought in Nietzsche’s time, a sham that parades itself as pure
cold truth. Nietzsche argues that truth is seduction, we believe what
we want to believe and project it through abstraction into the places we
can not see or are afraid to look. Baudrillard, another French
Nietzschean philosopher, took ‘Truth is Seduction’ as the starting point
of his philosophy, wandering in Vegas and marvelling at the seduction
of consumerism and the spectacles we can create through technology.
“Gradually
it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been:
namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary
and unconscious memoir... Accordingly, I do not believe that a ‘drive to
knowledge’ is the father of philosophy, but rather that another drive
has, here as elsewhere, employed understanding (and misunderstanding) as
a mere instrument. But anyone who considers the basic drives of man to
see what extent they may have been at play just here as inspiring
spirits (or demons and kobolds) will find that all of them have done
philosophy at some time, and that every single one of them would like
only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of
existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives.” (BGE 6)
“It
is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only
an interpretation of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a
world-explanation.” (BGE 14)
“There
are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are ‘immediate
certainties’, for example, ‘I think’, or as the superstition of
Schopenhauer put it, ‘I will’, as though knowledge here got hold of its
object purely and nakedly as ‘the thing in itself’, without
falsification on the part of either the subject or the object...I shall
repeat a hundred times, we really ought to free ourselves from the
seduction of words!” (BGE 16)
“With
regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of
emphasizing a small terse fact, which these superstitious minds hate to
concede: namely, that a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’
wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say
that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think’. IT
thinks...The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek and German
philosophizing is explained easily enough. Where there is affinity of
languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar, I
mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar
grammatical functions, that everything is prepared at the outset for a
similar development and sequence of philosophical systems, just as the
way seems barred against certain other possibilities of
world-interpretation.” (BGE 17)
“O
holy simplicity! In what strange simplification and falsification man
lives! One can never cease wondering once one has acquired eyes for
this marvel! How we have made everything around us clear and free and
easy and simple! How we have been able to give our senses a passport to
everything superficial, our thoughts a divine desire for wanton leaps
and wrong inferences! How from the beginning we have contrived to
retain our ignorance...and only on this now solid, granite foundation of
ignorance could knowledge rise so far, the will to knowledge on the
foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to ignorance, to the
uncertain, to the untrue, not as its opposite, but as its refinement!
Even if language, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness,
and will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and
many subtleties of gradation...here and there we understand it and
laugh at the way in which precisely science at its best seeks most to
keep us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitable constructed
and suitable falsified world, at the way in which, willy-nilly, it loves
error, because, being alive, it loves life.” (BGE 24)
“Take
care, philosophers and friends, of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom,
of suffering ‘for truth’s sake’, even of defending yourselves...as
though ‘the truth’ were such an innocuous and incompetent creature as to
require protectors!” (BGE 25)
“In
all seriousness, the innocence of our thinkers is somehow touching and
evokes reverence, when today they still step before consciousness with
the request that it should please give them honest answers...A
philosopher has nothing less than a right to ‘bad character’, as the
being who has so far always been fooled best on earth. He has a duty to
suspicion today, to squint maliciously out of every abyss of
suspicion...Why couldn’t the world that concerns us, be a fiction? And
if somebody asked, ‘but to a fiction there surely belongs an author?’,
couldn’t one answer simply: Why? Doesn’t this ‘belongs’ perhaps belong
to the fiction too?...Shouldn’t philosophers be permitted to rise above
faith in grammar?” (BGE 34)
“One should not dodge one’s tests, though they may be the most dangerous.” (BGE 41)
“Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.” (BGE 76)
“Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.” (BGE 78)
“A man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child at play.” (BGE 94)
“A people is a detour of nature to get to six or seven great men. Yes, and then to get around them.” (BGE 126)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885)
This
is one of the most famous of Nietzsche’s books. The opening passages
are quite famous and are quoted often. The prose is intentionally
mocking the Bible, Plato and other classics.
Nietzsche
believed that the Persian prophet Zarathustra, one of the first
monotheists, was also the first dualist to separate good from evil, so
Nietzsche has Zarathustra become the first to go ‘beyond’ good and evil,
to recognize the error of his dualism, and see the interdependence and
totality of the whole. Zarathustra starts in his cave, then ‘goes
down’, a theme that recurs.
Zarathustra
first encounters after going down out of cave a forest dweller (very
Indian), who is avoiding people and loving god as people are too
imperfect. This sage in the woods is what Zarathustra has overcome. He
gets to town, and addresses the people, who have gathered to watch a
tightrope walker. Note that the superman is one who the people watch
and love, who straddles an abyss and creates and dances like the
tightrope walker, but in this scene the tightrope walker is a mere
spectacle and the people are not supposed to do the same. Some of the
most quoted lines of the text come from this scene, as Zarathustra
addresses the crowd.
“I
teach you the superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed.
What have you done to surpass him? All beings have so far created
something beyond themselves, and you want to be the ebb of that great
tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man? What is
the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame, and just the same
shall man be to the superman. You have made your way from the worm to
man, and much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even
yet man is more of an ape that any of the apes. Even the wisest among
you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom...Truly, man is
a polluted stream. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream
without becoming impure.” (TSZ 3)
“Man
is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman, a rope over an
abyss, a dangerous crossing...What is great in man is that he is a
bridge and not a goal.” (TSZ 4)
