Simply Nietzsche, page 13
Jesus Christ himself, according to Nietzsche at any rate, was not a “miracle worker and redeemer,” nor one who invented a reality of heaven beyond this world, but someone whose practice and behavior “towards the henchmen, the way he acted in the face of his accusers and every type of slander and derision” (A 35) constituted an example of how to live. His “kingdom of heaven” is a psychological one, and his death is “not a bridge” to another world. Jesus himself was a unique psychological type. However, this “symbolism” became embroiled in the psychology of ressentiment. St. Paul represents the opposite of Jesus as “the bringer of glad tidings.” It was he who concocted the myth of the resurrection and a life beyond this world in order to gain power and offer an interpretation of human existence to support it. Nietzsche saw St. Paul as a concrete example of the priestly type we met in On the Genealogy of Morality. In connection with this, TheAnti-Christ also contains some of Nietzsche’s most unequivocal statements in favor of science as the route to truth. Priests “can only imagine one great danger: and that is science” (A 49). Key here is Nietzsche’s view that religion rests on a faulty conception of cause and effect, a theme that comes up in this work, as well as in the Twilight of the Idols. Phenomena like bad conscience and guilt are given interpretations of their causal origins, which are false. Guilt is not “the voice of God in man,” as he put in Ecce Homo.
This brings us to Ecce Homo, and the question of Nietzsche’s sanity. It is an autobiography of an extraordinary sort. The hyperbole of its section titles is evident. We have “Why I am so Wise,” “Why I am So Clever, “Why I Write Such Good Books,” and “Why I am a Destiny.” These titles could be taken as indications of Nietzsche’s deteriorating mental state, on the one hand, or as satire on the very business of autobiography, on the other. Some of the claims he made in EH are pure fiction. He claimed to be descended from Polish nobility through his father’s side (his relationship with his mother and his sister was very poor at the time he wrote the work). “I am,” he wrote, “a pure-blooded Polish nobleman without a drop of bad blood” (EH, Why I am So Wise 3). Again, such a preposterous claim can be read two ways: either, again, as a sign of his mental decline, or a rhetorical device to distance himself from contemporary Germany, which he saw as culturally decadent and jingoistic. The summaries of his works are not up to what one might expect from him, including the fact that he devoted most ink to discussing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. His letters, though, written at about the same time, seem, as I mentioned, to exhibit incipient megalomania. Philosophically, there are familiar themes from his previous works but presented in ways that require the reader to have a prior grasp of his work.
It is, I think, difficult to discern the extent to which Nietzsche’s illness affected Ecce Homo. The title of the work itself—“behold the man”—is a reference to what Roman procurator of Judea Pontius Pilate supposedly declared on seeing Christ in his crown of thorns prior to his crucifixion, and many works of art were produced bearing that title. For Nietzsche, the title played on a contrast between the ideal ascetic type of Christianity and Nietzsche’s own alternative, Dionysos. The final line of the work is “Have I been understood?—Dionysos verses the crucified” (EH, Why I am a Destiny 9). In telling us why he is a destiny, he elaborated on this contrast by explaining in what his “immoralism” consisted. He negated a human ideal, that of the benevolent and charitable, and the ascetic, Christian morality, which we have considered in various places in this book. He repeated his idea that such a morality encourages the “last men”—the type who values docile contentment and freedom from suffering. Such types “live at the expense of the truth as much as they live at the expense of the future” (EH, Why I am a Destiny 4). As well as Dionysos, this is another call back to The Birth of Tragedy. What is needed is the type who “conceives reality as it is,” and “everything terrible and questionable” about it (EH, Why I am a Destiny 5). The Birth of Tragedy required us to confront the awful character of existence but through the aesthetic lens of tragedy. Here Nietzsche appeared simply to think in terms of someone strong enough to affirm reality while grasping it as it really is.
But what of the book’s subtitle? How does one become what one is? We discussed this topic in the chapter on Beyond Good and Evil, but Ecce Homo adds a little to the basic thesis, explaining how Nietzsche became who he is. He described himself as decadent, particularly in terms of his own physical sickness. But this illness allowed him to be the opposite of decadent, for it furnished him with a will to spiritual health. It allowed for his change of perspective, a shift from the nihilism of his Wagner/Schopenhauer period to his more affirmative philosophy. Nietzsche attempted to describe in general “how one becomes what one is” in Why I am So Clever, 9. Those looking for instructions, however, will be disappointed. Its lead motif is that there must be some organizing drive—works at the unconscious level—and becoming “what you are presupposes you have not the slightest idea of what you are.” Consciousness needs to be free of misconceptions of one’s self, which might interfere with instincts. What is central to this “organizing” idea is selfishness, which is presumably a matter of its co-opting other drives in its direction. So, self-creation, as I suggested a few chapters ago, is more a matter of luck or fate than the expression itself might seem to suggest. Nietzsche’s life, as he suggested, had been a series of fortunes and misfortunes, which finally led to the appropriate conditions for the flourishing of its nature. Perhaps what Nietzsche was really expressing was his own “formula for human greatness,” as he called it in the next section. Not “to want anything to be different, not forwards, not backwards, not for all eternity. Not just to tolerate necessity, still less to conceal it … all idealism is hypocrisy towards necessity—but to love it.” One can only hope that this attitude survived the fate that would befall Nietzsche mere weeks after writing that sentence when his capacity to reason left him.
Nietzsche’s Legacy
It is rather difficult to write about Nietzsche’s legacy. Returning to a point I made in the Preface, his writings are complex and yet have a powerful attraction. That is why his works have been read—and often misread—in different, and utterly contradictory, ways. Indeed, in some cases “read” might be too strong a word: “cherry-picked” is perhaps more fitting. Nietzsche anticipated being misunderstood, which might explain why the closing sections of Ecce Homo each begin with the question “Have I been understood?”
So, Nietzsche has a legacy of being misunderstood in all languages into which his writings had been translated, and in practically every country where his books had been published. His ideas were discussed in Japan at the beginning of the 20th century, even though no translations of his works in Japanese were then available. In Uruguay in 1900, essayist José Rodó repudiated the Übermensch in his essay Ariel, while in Peru in 1928, philosopher José Mariátegui made a Marxist hero out of Nietzsche. In China, interest in his thoughts began at about the same time as it did in Japan, only to be suppressed when the communists came to power. The playwright George Bernard Shaw authored the play Man and Superman, bringing the Übermensch and Don Juan together on the stage in 1902. In France, much later in the 1970s, some remarks of Nietzsche’s about truth and interpretation were imaginatively spun into something dubbed the “New Nietzsche,” which appeared resolutely set against taking Nietzsche at his repeated word about facts, psychology, and experience. French philosopher Sarah Kofman wrote several books centered on her reading of Nietzsche, intertwined with Freud and feminism. A Holocaust survivor and defender of Nietzsche against the charge of antisemitism, Kofman read his books along the lines of the “New Nietzsche” in a rather intimate way. Curiously, she committed suicide on the 150th anniversary of Nietzsche’s death.
In America, the conservative critic Allan Bloom wrote an article entitled “How Nietzsche Conquered America,” which, while admitting that Nietzsche is difficult to understand, pins the blame for something he calls “value-relativism”—the crude idea that no values are better than others—lamenting that “un-American ideas took root in America. More recently, psychologist Steven Pinker managed spectacularly to misunderstand the Enlightenment and failed to recognize that Nietzsche comprehended the movement and its implications. Instead, Pinker preferred to think Nietzsche recommended a life without feeling and conscience. Another psychologist, Jordan Peterson, found inspiration in Nietzsche in his campaign against the left, while somehow still extolling the values of Christianity.
One could go on, almost endlessly, about the impact of Nietzsche’s works on people with very different values and dispositions, and if that is his legacy, it is, as I mentioned, misunderstood. What Nietzsche deserves is not another attempt to make him a poster boy or bête noire for someone else’s project by appealing to pithy quotations, but instead the effort, which is now thankfully being made, to understand him on his own terms. Nietzsche knew the dangers that stem from his writings, but he claimed that the fault was not necessarily his. Modern man, he noted, lacks a quality that cows have which is necessary for him to be understood—rumination.
Sources
BT – The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Geuss and Spiers, Cambridge, 1999
UT – Untimely Meditations, ed. Breazeale, Cambridge, 1997
HAH – Human, All Too Human, ed. Hollingdale and Schacht, Cambridge, 1986
D – Daybreak, ed. Clark and Leiter, Cambridge, 1997
GS – The Gay Science, ed. Williams, Cambridge, 2001
Z – Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Pippin and Del Caro, Cambridge, 2006
BGE – Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Horstmann and Norman, Cambridge, 2002
GM – On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Clark and Swensen, Hackett, 1998
TI – Twilight of the Idols, ed. Ridley and Norman, Cambridge, 2005
A – The Anti-Christ, ed. Ridley and Norman, Cambridge, 2005
EH – Ecce Homo, ed. Ridley and Norman, Cambridge, 2005
WP – The Will to Power, ed. Kaufmann, Vintage, 1968
Suggested Reading
There has been so much written on Nietzsche that it is hard to know where to begin, but two biographical studies can be suggested. Julian Young’s biography, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge, 2010), though enormous, is very readable, and doesn’t demand too much from those unfamiliar with philosophy as an academic discipline. Lesley Chamberlin’s Nietzsche in Turin (Quarter, 1996) is a very engaging account of Nietzsche’s last sane year.
When it comes to interpreting Nietzsche’s philosophy, so much has been written about this subject, but a lot of it is of dubious quality. The introductory material to each of the works listed in the sources section of this book is, on the whole, pretty good, though some of it might be taxing for the non-specialist. Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins What Nietzsche Really Said (Schocken, 2000) doesn’t live up to its title (few books could), but it is readable and not too misleading. For a look at what first-rate scholarship on Nietzsche looks like, the reader could not do better than Gemes and Richardson (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (Oxford, 2013).
About the Author
Peter Kail is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Official Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy. He is the author of Projection and Realism in Hume’s Philosophy (2007) and co-editor of Nietzsche on Mind and Nature (2015). He is a founder member of the International Nietzsche Society and serves on its executive committee.
Afterword
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A Note on the Type
This book was set on Pressbooks on LUTHER, a traditional book theme named after Martin Luther, the great German Protestant reformer. An earlier version of this type was commissioned by Fortress Press/Augsburg Fortress.
Peter Kail, Simply Nietzsche
