In
the early 1800s, the time of the philosophers Schopenhauer and
Kierkegaard, Germany and German thought went through a period of great
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 work 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 the 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 students Marx and
Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto for this discouraged audience,
arguing that the people would one day rise up and overcome oppression
with a revolution that would remove the capitalists from society just as
the French Revolution had removed the nobility and much of the clergy.
Recall
that Descartes, Kant and other Rationalists argued that the human mind
is capable of deducing certain and objective truth, such as that found
in algebraic mathematics. When the political tide turned against the
German people, who sought a more reasonable society like the Americans
and French, the people began to wonder about reason and human progress.
Is the world, society or mind run by reason? If so, does reason always
work objectively for the good of everyone? This created a tide of
pessimism, found in popular folk songs and elite intellectual texts
alike. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates (as Plato’s mouthpiece) argued
that the world is created from ideal forms that can be known by the just
and wise, but Thrasymachus argued that justice is merely the will of
the stronger who can impose their ‘order’ on others. German thought
likewise turned from the reason of Leibniz and Kant towards the will of
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as the ordering force in the Darwinian world.
The world is tough, not necessarily reasonable, and ideas must be
fought for, even if they are imperfect. Life, at its best, is romantic
and dramatic, not rational or mathematical. Kant and Hegel were
confident that reason can complete itself as a system. Pessimism turned
away from reason, completion and objectivity, towards passion,
incompleteness and subjectivity.
German
pessimism, centrally Schopenhauer and his follower Nietzsche but also
very applicable to the Dutch thinker Kierkegaard, fed into the later
Existentialism of Sartre and Absurdism of Camus. Sartre, who coined the
term ‘Existentialism’, claimed Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as its
founders, even though neither used the term. All these thinkers
flourished in popularity during two more recent periods of pessimism:
WWI for Europe (producing the Dada modern art movement) and post-WWII
for America (producing the counter-culture of the beatniks during the
Korean war, and then hippies during the Vietnam War, both particularly
thriving in the Bay Area).
Arthur Schopenhauer
(1788 - 1860), who looks in his famous portrait like a cross between a
cranky old grandfather and Wolverine of the X Men, was a follower of
Kant, but unlike his own follower Nietzsche who despised Kant and argued
against him frequently, Schopenhauer took Kant’s philosophy and
radically inverted it. Like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s father died
tragically when he was young, leaving him free to pursue philosophy
rather than the family profession. For Schopenhauer, it was business.
For Nietzsche, it was the ministry.
Remember
that Kant conceded to Hume that the world is unknown and all we can
have about it are assumptions, but reason is capable of rendering
objective truth about the mind and its categories. Schopenhauer, more
pessimistic about the use of reason 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 Kant’s Rationalism
and mathematical science to Buddhism and the ecstasy of art. Much as
Marx took Hegel and “stood him on his head”, turning his dialectical
Idealism into dialectical materialism, Schopenhauer stood Kant on his
head, in some ways following his own Kantian teacher Fichte, turning
from the objectivity of reason to the centrality of will.
Schopenhauer
argued that we are, in essence, a striving. Like Nietzsche, his
follower, Schopenhauer was critical of other philosophers for focusing
on abstractions of reason and ignoring love, friendship, sexuality, and
artistic passion, which are central to our existence. For Kant freedom
comes from reason. For Schopenhauer, freedom is only in terms of the
will, found primarily in the motions of the body. Schopenhauer, like
Freud, considered the freedom of reason to be an illusion, as the mind
is compulsive relative to the body. Thoughts appear free, but the
purest part of our freedom is not in the channeling of abstractions, but
in the self-recognition of volition.
Schopenhauer
compared abstract concepts to Plato’s shadows on the cave wall, what he
considered to be the ultimate insight of Plato. However, for
Schopenhauer, the Sun outside the cave is the will of all, not the sum
of conceptions. Schopenhauer argued that there is no objective thought
apart from emotion, though he did not systematize this interaction.
Nietzsche would pick up this theme later, just as Freud would attempt
to systematize it as Psychoanalysis. While many previous thinkers such
as Plato try to separate emotion from thought to make it objective, for
Schopenhauer thinking is delusional abstraction that separates us from
our true self. It is individuation of abstraction, the abstract idea of
separate selves, separate from the world and each other, that causes
the will to be at odds with itself, which causes the selfishness often
associated with will. The world is a battleground because of
abstractions and ideas, which have misled the will into conflicts with
itself. Science is not raising humanity up, but dividing it among
itself. Science conjures up distinctions, while only art reunites us
with the will as an undivided whole.
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 brief philosophical rivals. As
Hegel was becoming 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 and
Schopenhauer only had five students, he resigned after a single semester
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 Phenomenology of Spirit he felt as if he were
in a madhouse.
Schopenhauer
also ridiculed Hegel’s conception of history, which presented the
Germans as near the summit of human civilization and world history.
Schopenhauer did not see civilization as changing, but rather the same
old mess. Society is a painful struggle of will. Beneath
representation, the divisions of abstractions, there is only one will,
divided and at war with itself. The world’s wars and social conflicts,
such as the uprisings that contributed to German pessimism which
eventually brought Schopenhauer his fame, convinced him that there was
little progress and humanity remained much the same as it always had,
without the possibility of Hegel’s great ascension. Schopenhauer
believed that time doesn’t progress, and wrote that the history of a
village and the history of an empire teach us the same thing. This is a
very cyclical and cynical view of humanity, one that I admit I am
partial to while allowing for technological evolution and its effect.
While
Hume did not speak his views about theism or atheism publicly,
Schopenhauer, like Hegel’s student Marx, was openly atheist, the first
of the central modern European philosophers. Schopenhauer did believe
that the world was alive, but not that it was rational. Schopenhauer’s
solution to the problem of evil was to reject the idea that a living
world is a rational world. While he believed that the world shared a
single will, he believed that rationality had turned the world against
itself, each part striving against the other parts. Even as an atheist,
Schopenhauer was deeply influenced by Indian thought, specifically the
Upanishads, Vedanta and Buddhism. As a youth, he had received a Latin
translation of the Upanishads, the distillation of the philosophical
meanings of the Hindu Vedas, and he was so impressed with them that he
continued to read them every night before bed, and left the book open on
his desk. Of the Upanishads, he wrote that they were the most sublime
philosophy of world history, the product of “the highest human wisdom”,
and that, “it has been the consolation of my life and will be the
consolation of my death”. He predicted that the philosophy of the
Upanishads would replace Christianity as the religion of Europe.
Schopenhauer
only learned about Buddhism after he had already composed his
philosophy, but he saw deep parallels between the Four Noble Truths of
the Buddha and his own conception of existence as will and suffering,
and would sometimes refer to himself as a Buddhist. The first three of
the Four Noble Truths are existence is suffering, the cause of suffering
is desire, and there is a way out of suffering. He wrote that, if his
own philosophy was correct, it would be expected that it agree with the
most popular system of thought in human history. He received
instruction in meditation from a friend, 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
central great work, The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als
Wille und Vorstellung, 1818 CE), famously opens with the words, “The
world is my representation”, about as succinct an expression of Idealism
possible, particularly standing next to the long-winded works of Kant
and Hegel. Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche rejected Kant and Hegel’s
approach of writing exhaustive systems, preferring to have several clear
and deep ideas expressed in aphorisms, regardless of how systematic.
This has made both more popular and enjoyable to read than Kant and
Hegel for non-professionals, such as artists and authors.
For
Schopenhauer, the mind represents and idealizes the world, which is
essentially will. All things, including the concrete self and abstract
conceptions, are manifestations of will. 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 built 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.
The subject that recognizes itself as willing still sees itself as a
self, what Schopenhauer calls the “knot of the world”, the “mystery par
excellence”, the only event purely for and in itself. Other than this
authentic recognition, human existence is self-denial, a pendulum
between boredom and pain.
There
is for Schopenhauer one escape from will and the self, just as for
Buddhism the fourth of the Noble Truths is that the way out is Buddhism
itself. For Schopenhauer it is not Buddhism but art, through which 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, self-assertion 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. The composer
Wagner befriended Nietzsche and promoted Nietzsche’s work due to their
mutual love of the philosophy of Schopenhauer, revolutionary work for
pessimistically minded German intellectuals of their time. The greatest
art after music is tragedy, as it shows us the unified will divided
painfully against itself. Consider the works of Shakespeare, and the
suffering undergone due to ignorance and passion.
Like
much of Indian thought, but very unlike Descartes, Schopenhauer saw
animals as intimately related to human beings, both being similar
manifestations of will, striving and suffering. Schopenhauer even
believed that crystals display will, much like the ancient Greek
philosopher Thales believed that magnets have souls, and that crystals
are halfway between earth and vegetation. 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
restricting the will in themselves and others.
Schopenhauer
argued against the use of the pronoun ‘it’ when referring to animals,
as it lead to them being treated as mere objects. This is in complete
disagreement with Descartes, who thought that animals were automata
without sensation. While Descartes said that there is no greater a
misleading mistake as to think that animals have souls, Schopenhauer
wrote, “He who is cruel to living creatures cannot be a good man”. For
Schopenhauer, animals live in a simpler, continuous present moment, much
as Buddhism teaches. Animals are also incapable of the abstractions
needed to harm others through elaborate technologies. Like Nietzsche,
there is a romanticism for a simpler, more authentic past shared with
Rousseau, the Transcendentalists, as well as ancient Chinese Daoists.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
(1844 - 1900 CE), the great mustachioed one, came from a long line of
protestant Lutheran preachers, five generations deep on his father’s
side. Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s father died when he was five years
old, suffering both physically and mentally from debilitating insanity.
Nietzsche as a boy wondered why both his father, a passionate preacher
loved by the community, and older brother suffered and died for no
apparent reason 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. Nietzsche
also studied philology, a now forgotten subject similar to social and
anthropological linguistics.
From
1869 Nietzsche was a professor of philology at the University of Basel,
Switzerland’s third largest city bordering both France and Germany. He
was close with many of his fellow professors, and frequently visited
the composer Wagner and his wife Cosima in nearby Lucerne. At first
Nietzsche revered Wagner, writing that he was one of the great geniuses
of the age, and the two bonded over a love of Schopenhauer. Wagner read
Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and wrote to Nietzsche that Nietzsche
was, along with his wife, the closest person by far to himself. Then
Wagner became increasingly Christian, German-nationalist, and
antisemitic, and his music became full of flash and pomp. Nietzsche,
quite opposed to traditional religion, nationalism, and antisemitism,
wrote to Wagner imploring him to see the light. Wagner replied with
silence, and the friendship ended, to Nietzsche’s great sorrow.
While
Wagner adored Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), it
was shunned by academics and ignored by the public. Nietzsche 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.
Nietzsche
particularly admired Heraclitus, who he saw as closer to his own
thought than any other thinker. In Nietzsche’s philosophical
autobiography, Ecce Homo (‘Behold the Man” in Latin, the words of
Pontius Pilate as he reveals Jesus to the crowd who condemns him),
Nietzsche writes, “In (Heraclitus’) proximity I feel altogether warmer
and better than anywhere else...all this is clearly more closely related
to me than anything else thought of date”. Nietzsche also identified
Heraclitus’ thought with that of Schopenhauer, and quoted Schopenhauer
in explaining the philosophy of Heraclitus. Nietzsche, like Heraclitus,
enjoyed comparing humans to apes, to humble us and encourage us to
evolve beyond what we are, writing, “If God created the world, then He
made man His ape, to provide constant amusement during His overlong
eternities.” Heraclitus wrote: “In everything we have attained the
excellence of apes.”
Nietzsche
became sick with stomach problems and other health matters, which would
plague him for the rest of his life, and in 1879 he resigned his
professorship. Nietzsche wrote that sickness was “the teacher of great
suspicion”, and was well aware that, as a philosopher who argued that
all philosophy is personal interpretation, he wrote in praise of
strength and independence as a sickly individual. For the next ten
years, until 1889, he traveled largely in France and Italy, seeking a
warm climate in winters for his ailments, and wrote several books which
are celebrated today but in their time almost entirely unnoticed.
Nietzsche’s great works of this period include his Human All too Human,
The Dawn, The Playful Science (often translated “The Gay Science”, but
as the famed translator Kaufmann notes the word ‘gay’ has a different
meaning since the sixties, and it should be understood as merry,
irreverent, and joyful), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil,
The Genealogy of Morals, The Twilight of the Idols (subtitled: How to
Philosophize with a Hammer), and Ecce Homo. With Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, he believed he had finally found his true voice and final
philosophy, and the books that follow are considered his definitive
work.
It
was also during this period that Nietzsche befriended Paul Ree, who
introduced him to Lou Salome, and the three traveled together while
Nietzsche shared and developed his thinking with them until this
friendship broke apart in 1883, the year he finished Thus Spoke
Zarathustra and entered his final definitive period. There is a famous
photo of the three friends with Nietzsche and Ree yoked to a cart, and
Salome in the cart holding a whip, likely taken at a carnival. While
Nietzsche had problems with women, confessing some of these opinions in
his early Untimely Meditations, calling them “my truths” after warning
against Kantian notions of objective truth, he wrote later to Ree in
1882 that Salome was the most intelligent person he had ever met, just
as he had admired the intelligence of Wagner’s wife Cosima years before.
After splitting with Ree and Salome, Nietzsche often complained that
he could find no one who could understand his vision, and he longed to
find people as or more intelligent and far seeing as himself.
Tragically,
in 1889 at the age of forty five, just as he was beginning to gain fame
and popularity, his books being read and professors giving lectures
about him, he had a period of great bliss and happiness, followed by a
lapse into increasingly catatonic insanity. According to the story,
Nietzsche saw a fallen horse being beaten in the street, and he threw
his arms around its neck, weeping uncontrollably. After this, he said
and wrote very little. While some opposed to Nietzsche’s skeptical
thinking have argued that insanity was the result of his philosophy,
others who embrace Nietzsche’s thought, including Karl Jaspers, one of
Nietzsche’s first major interpreters and also a psychiatrist, have
argued that Nietzsche’s eventual insanity was the result of a genetic
condition he inherited from his father.
Nietzsche
saw himself as a great awakening, as one who saw that reality is as one
constructs it. Hegel argued that reality is both objective and
subjective, a social construct, but Hegel tried to systematize
subjectivity to reveal the structure of objectivity. Nietzsche saw
himself as destroying the myth of the objective system, and he hoped
that those who understood him would transform reality and themselves as
they saw fit, having the courage to make leaps of faith once they saw
that it can be done. An emotional and entertaining author, Nietzsche
makes bold judgements, often involving great praise or condemnation, but
he was not making pronouncements about final answers, but demonstrating
the ability to continue to question. This is why, as Nietzsche himself
wrote, he had earned the right to be wrong as well as contradict
himself in countless ways. Rather than defend truth as a final form, he
had hoped to inspire a great will to truth in others, a courage to plum
the depths and kick the tires.
Jaspers
argued that self-contradiction was the fundamental ingredient in
Nietzsche’s thought, and that Nietzsche seems to have two opinions about
everything, which is the reason that socialists and individualists,
scientists and artists, theists and atheists, and all other varieties of
opinionated people find passages of Nietzsche that they lovingly quote
to support their own views or bitterly condemn as supporting the
opposition. Our capacity for understanding oversimplifies existence,
and because noncontradictory understanding must remain on the surface
great thinking often requires self-contradiction. Nietzsche’s thought
is not a system, but a passion, a journey to new truth. Jaspers said
that to understand Nietzsche you must also be in motion, must be
passionate, and must be willing to discover new things about yourself.
Truth is something progressively revealed, but also truth is
fundamentally ambiguous, able to be interpreted and reinterpreted in
countless ways. These seem mutually exclusive, but only to that in us
which demands final, closed answers.
Nietzsche did not want his texts to be read like newspapers, available to all regardless of ability.
There
is no one way, so find your own way, Nietzsche implores the reader.
Nietzsche encouraged his readers to distrust him as he distrusts
himself. Truth, in the individual or society, should not need to be
defended, but rather put into conflict, forcing it to rise to the
occasion or perish. Nietzsche wrote that if he was to pronounce a law
that should not be broken, it would only be for the purposes of testing
the individual who would be courageous enough to strengthen themselves
by breaking it. Suffering, error and contradiction are necessary in
every great development, which Nietzsche argued the great must embrace
and cherish.
Nietzsche
argued against the two extremes of morality and nihilism. He saw
Europe as entering a crisis after the Enlightenment, in which all
objectivity, authority and morality were called into question. Most
would turn to morality and objectivity, giving their individuality to
religion, science or politics without criticism in the hope of security.
Others would lose all faith and motivation, turning to nihilism and
renouncing the ability to believe and create. Between these two
extremes, Nietzsche argues, is the tightrope walker, the one who faces
the void, the absence of complete security and certainty, and decides to
create meaning, to give their life some meaning needing no authority
other than their own individuality. Nietzsche distinguished himself
from nihilists, saying he had never feared finding the way out of the
hole of nothing and arriving at something.
Nietzsche
valued creativity (‘Schaffen’, in German), and lauded the individual’s
ability to outthink the herd. Nietzsche at times said he was creating
new values, new ideals, and at others that he was smashing all idols
without replacing them with others. Both these are true. Nietzsche
found values for himself, and for others who enjoyed them, but he wanted
everyone to be free to find their own, and so permanent social idols
were to be smashed and not replaced, but some ideal must be asserted by
the individual to avoid the collapse into nihilism. Like for Descartes,
skeptical questioning leads to positive results, but unlike for
Descartes, Kant and later positivists, Nietzsche’s positive result is
individual and unavoidably involved contradictions.
Nietzsche
often compared humanity to animals, as did Schopenhauer. Nietzsche
wrote that humanity is the most refined beast of prey, founding nations
and making war, deceiving and trampling more effectively than any other
beast, more courageous and cruel than any other animal. When we cannot
be beastial in act, we are beastial in thought. However, unlike all
other animals, humanity shows a far greater capacity for change and
evolution, if not so much in physiology then in thought and technology.
Nietzsche viewed the human individual much as Schopenhauer viewed the
world, as a will divided against itself, as an ecosystem of drives. Our
various drives, which resemble those of every other human individual
but also vary between any two individuals, help each other, fight each
other, conceal each other, redirect each other, and invoke each other.
In
order to view ourselves, we must construct a concept. Not only are
systems of thought social constructs, as we learned with Hegel, but the
self is a self-construct as well as a social construct. We must
interpret ourselves just as we must interpret the world. We are
constantly deceiving ourselves about ourselves, as we are about others
and the world. We must view everything, including the thing which most
matters to us, our own self, through “the fictions of language and
logic”, as Nietzsche says. We forget and conceal in creating meaning.
We are and are not ourselves, just as Heraclitus wrote. The selves
that we construct are both fictions and fact, intertwined.
Suppressed
drives find means of release. Often they turn inwards, and can become
poisonous, life-denying rather than life-affirming. Unlike hunger, most
drives can subsist and be satisfied through ideas, judgements, and
dreams. Nietzsche hated revenge and pity. He saw both as terrible
forms of repression, example of when our ability to limit ourselves
becomes a blockage to progress and expansion. Nietzsche feared the
revenge of the herd, which he labeled with the French term,
‘resentiment’, resentment with an ‘i’ in the middle. The herd fear the
new, individual and nonconformist, as these call objectivity and
authority into question. We can always blame others, rather than
ourselves, for our situation. Nietzsche saw German nationalism and
antisemitism as examples of this in his own day, as well as the
Christian persecutions of others. Great individuals do not need to join
groups to gain strengths, nor blame other groups for their faults.
Nietzsche, compared to other philosophers, was very honest about his
faults and limitations.
While
Nietzsche admired science, he saw scientism, the positivistic worship
of science as objectivity and rationality, as a hinderance to science’s
own progress. While Nietzsche argued that it is good to be acquainted
with the sciences, this should pave the way towards renouncing
objectivity, absolute knowledge and universal facts. Nietzsche was
afraid that science and politics would replace religion, becoming the
new dominant dogmatism. Nietzsche wrote, “He who is willing to dismiss
God clings all the more firmly to the belief in morality”. Moralities
justify themselves, and thus they endure, justify themselves as law and
thus disguise the joy in causing pain, the vengeance of what is labeled
impartial. Nietzsche believes that this is what has been understood for
all of history but is rarely challenged. Cultures set themselves off
from others through ideology, including the internal divisions of class
and ethnicity. Moralities, universal rules prescribed, are always
directed from one group of people against another.
Nietzsche
argued that Jesus, like himself, was actually an immoralist, teaching
people to free themselves from judgement and authority, writing, “Jesus
took sides against those who judge: he wished to be the destroyer of
morality”. Nietzsche was well aware that when Jesus was asked which is
the most important commandment, he said to love others, which is not one
of the commandments, which can be interpreted as an overturning of the
old law. Jesus also taught that enemies should be loved and outcasts
embraced, an overturning of social convention.
Nietzsche
wrote that he wanted humanity to become less universalized and more
specialized, to become less recognizable to all the others. Like
Heraclitus, Nietzsche argued that some men are superior, rising above
others, but foolishly choose to believe that they know the truth for
everyone including themselves. Only the greater ‘superman’ (Ubermensch
in German), comes to realize that they do not need to know the truth for
everyone but only construct greater truth for themselves. This
elevates and enables humanity as a model to follow far more than the one
who considers their superiority to be universal supremacy and
objectivity. Superior men fear failure, as this would threaten to
dethrone their supremacy, but the superman embraces failures and faults,
and has earned the ability to learn from and own their imperfections.
Thus
Spoke Zarathustra (1885), the book which brought Nietzsche to his final
definitive philosophy, is often quoted regarding the superman.
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 see 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. 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 that the people are not supposed to imitate. 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?...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...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.”
Beyond
Good and Evil (1886) is also considered to be one of Nietzsche’s
greatest books, one of the best expressions of his thought. 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 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.” (BGE 2)
“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)
“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)
“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...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.” (BGE 17)
“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?...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)
“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)
It
was a shame, especially given this last line, that Nietzsche was used
by some 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. The Nazis called the aryan
race ‘supermen’ and other races the inferior 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’, moved to Switzerland
and renounced his German citizenship to walk alone high in the
mountains. Surely this is how he would rather have been remembered. In
1935, just after the Nazis had seized Germany and as some Nazis were
using interpretations of Nietzsche to support their political movement,
Karl Jaspers published his exhaustive book on Nietzsche’s philosophy to
argue that Nietzsche was neither a nationalist nor a racist. That year
he was dismissed from his professorship by the Nazi government.
