Simply Nietzsche, page 4
“how can your life, the individual life, receive the highest value, the deepest significance?” People are willing to sacrifice themselves to the state, he notes—the memory of the Franco-Prussian war still with him—but a healthy culture is of more importance than any state, and only great individuals can revitalize culture. We ought to aim to discover, and bring into being, the conditions conducive to the growth of great individuals, he posits. Third, there are the beginnings of Nietzsche’s reflections on the self. Later in his career, he puts the matter in terms of “becoming what one is.” This sounds paradoxical. How can one become what one already is? Roughly, what one is is not some fixed self or soul, but a collection of different inclinations, desires, emotions and values, many of which pull us in different directions. To become what one is implies that all those conflicting elements must come together to form a unity. The “educators”—the great types whose duty it is to provide the conditions of their flourishing—provide ideals which contribute to the organization of our disparate psychic elements into something more coherent. As exemplars, they provide the best “means of finding one’s self, of coming to oneself out of the bewilderment in which one usually wanders” (UT, p.130)
“Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” is an attempt, and perhaps not a successful one, at a balanced criticism of the composer and the supporters he encountered in Bayreuth. I have already mentioned that cracks were beginning to show in that relationship. Nietzsche attended rehearsals at Bayreuth and disliked the people whom he met intensely, exiting hastily and taking refuge in the countryside. He and Wagner clashed over the merits of Johannes Brahms. In “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” Nietzsche sees in Wagner a “tyrannical” aspect that threatens to overwhelm others. But quoting Wagner frequently, as Nietzsche does, expresses an ideal of Wagner’s art. Nietzsche was to claim later that the reason for his break with the composer was Wagner’s introduction of Christianity into Parsifal, but that is unlikely. Far more probable is that Nietzsche’s growing maturity allowed him to step out of the shadow of Wagner’s formidable personality. Indeed, Nietzsche was to become his own man, but we would never be as happy again.
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1 Nietzsche on Art, (London: Routledge, 2007)
Turning New Ground
Human, All too Human and Daybreak
In 1886, Nietzsche wrote new prefaces to his previous works, including the one we have already quoted for BT. In the same year, he published his peculiar quasi-autobiography, Ecce Homo (EH), in which he also revisited his previous works in a section entitled “Why I Write Such Great Books.” We will return to look at EH later in this book, but what Nietzsche said there about Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (HAH) provides a useful entry point in this work. Human, All Too Human, he wrote, is the work “I used to liberate myself from things that did not belong to my nature.” His tone “is completely changed,” and there was “true progress” towards Nietzsche himself. Mistakes are “frozen to death,” and the work “put[s] an abrupt end to all ‘higher lies’, ‘idealism’ [and] ‘beautiful feelings’.” It was also the “moment my instinct made the inexorable decision to stop giving in, going along, and confusing me with other people.” It is easy to read this as a record of his break from Wagner and Schopenhauer, as he explicitly stated in his EH summary of HAH. Nietzsche sent a copy to Wagner just as he received the libretto of Parsifal from the composer, and these two books crossing paths was “like the sound of swords crossing,” he noted in EH. While the split between the two men didn’t happen overnight, the rift occurred. Nietzsche began writing HAH within days of his hasty exit from Bayreuth and was still working on it when he saw Wagner for the last time, as the two briefly overlapped in the beautiful Italian town of Sorrento.
The first edition of HAH is dedicated to the French writer Voltaire, a significant signal that Nietzsche distanced his philosophy from Wagner’s romanticism and the views expressed in BT. Voltaire was a figurehead of the optimism of the Enlightenment, of confidence in science and its role in progress. On the face of it, Voltaire embodies the Socratism Nietzsche was so skeptical of in BT, and which the Romanticism of Wagner also rejected. Voltaire was also significant with respect to the “tone” of HAH, and, indeed, one could say its tone is “French.” By that I mean its style is predominantly aphoristic, its tone lighter, and, in a sense I shall presently explain, concerns itself with psychological observations, and as such, it has clear antecedents in writers known as the “French Moralists,” who include Michel de Montaigne and François de La Rochefoucauld.
One sense in which HAH is an abrupt end to “idealism” is, precisely, Nietzsche’s indifference to the fundamental distinction between the world of appearance and the world “in-itself,” which conditions the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer. That is, HAH marks the end of his infatuation with transcendental idealism. As he put it the EH discussion of HAH, the “‘thing-in-itself’ is frozen to death.” There is no more concern with some mystical contact with the “primordial one” behind the world of appearance. HAH, it seems, embodies a conception of philosophy that is very un-Kantian, one which dispenses with metaphysics and the distinction between the real world of the thing-in-itself and the merely empirical world. This is not only a matter of Nietzsche recoiling from Kant and Schopenhauer. Nietzsche did not have any formal training in philosophy—he was a philology professor, after all—but very early on his interests were turning away from philology and towards philosophy. Indeed, he applied for a philosophy professorship in 1870, and unsurprisingly, given his lack of a background in this field, was unsuccessful. Nevertheless, he continued reading extensively in philosophy and the natural sciences, and the current of thought took him away from the metaphysics of Kant and Schopenhauer and towards a broadly “naturalistic” approach to philosophy. Generally speaking, naturalism in philosophy claims that only the sciences provide genuine knowledge, and so philosophical issues should be in the spirit of the sciences. Furthermore, it embodies an attitude to ourselves: human beings are no different in kind from the rest of the natural world—we are animals, grand and sophisticated, but animals nevertheless. Nietzsche’s naturalistic turn was heavily influenced by Friedrich Lange’s 1865 History of Materialism, which put forward the view that human nature is fundamentally physiological in character, and physiological processes are just forms of physical process.
I shall describe in a little more detail what that meant for Nietzsche in a moment, but there is a further factor in his new turn, namely his friendship with Paul Rée. I mentioned Rée briefly at the beginning of this book as the man who introduced Nietzsche to Lou Andreas-Salomé, but that was not the only significant contribution he made to Nietzsche. As well as being friends for about seven years, Rée was hugely influential, intellectually speaking, on Nietzsche’s change of direction. Rée had a doctorate in philosophy proper, and, like Nietzsche, initially admired Schopenhauer but rejected metaphysical approaches to the philosophy that Schopenhauer seemed to represent. Rée’s writing was influential too: he wrote in a style akin to the French Moralists, as Nietzsche would do. He also adopted a psychological approach to morality and was broadly naturalistic in his approach to philosophy in general. Very early into their friendship, Nietzsche read Rée’s Psychological Observations, so different both in style and content from the ponderous tomes of German metaphysics.
Rée, then, was philosophically and stylistically very important to Nietzsche, as well as instrumental to his fateful relationship with Lou Salomé. And they would work closely together and in a quite literal sense. He and Rée shared lodgings in Sorrento while Nietzsche continued to write HAH and Rée wrote his own On the Origin of Moral Sensation. There was, therefore, considerable cross-fertilization during this period and aspects of Rée’s influence would never leave Nietzsche’s thought, though Nietzsche’s attitude to some of Rée’s central claims would change in time.
Let us now turn to HAH itself. It comprises two volumes, the first of which was published in 1878 and the second in 1879. The latter is divided into two parts: “Assorted Opinions and Maxims” and “The Wander and his Shadow.” Volume One is divided into groups of aphorisms, and longer passages, under general headings. The first section, “Of first and last things,” announces Nietzsche’s new naturalistic and anti-metaphysical ideas. Human beings are natural beings—all too human—and, importantly, the product of historical process. The mistake of previous philosophies was to see humans as having a timeless God-made nature, while, thanks to the burgeoning success of Darwin, human nature must be seen as the product of evolution. Nietzsche’s approach, then, is to offer explanations of how human beliefs, practices like religion, and moral attitudes, emerged in the human animal. Most importantly, the existence of what we value most—morality, art, etc.—does not mean that there must be some higher realm of value, but instead that it must be conceived as the result of the way in which animal feelings and inclinations become changed and interpreted. Great things can have lowly origins. This idea continued to be important to Nietzsche. One of the “prejudices of philosophers,” as he posited in Beyond Good and Evil, is the assumption that something of great value can only come from some “good” source. So, morality must have come from God, or from some perfect goodness that lies beyond the ordinary world, as Plato believed. Nietzsche, by contrast, thought that our morality comes from ordinary feelings and desires.
We will come back to morality, but the shift from the metaphysical to the human in HAH shows an interesting approach to religious matters taken up in Part 3, entitled “The religious life.” Rather than trying directly to show that religious beliefs are false, Nietzsche suggests demonstrating how people might have the religious beliefs and experiences they do without presupposing the truth of those beliefs. If the truth of religion is not required to explain why people have the beliefs and the experiences they do, then we can dispense with God. Beliefs and feelings need not indicate contact with a “higher reality.” Instead, ordinary feelings are misinterpreted as glimpses of the divine, a beguiling misconception that gives the mundane great significance.
The essence of modern morality
In the context of a discussion of the religious spirit, Nietzsche began his critical discourse on what he took to be the core of modern morality, namely “asceticism”—an ideal of self-denial or “selflessness.” The morally ideal person disdains worldly goods and pleasures like material riches and sexual gratification; he or she is, above all else, concerned with other people. Nietzsche suggested, among other things, that behind this behavior is a more basic motive—that of control or power over one’s self. In reality, then, “selflessness” is a strategy to exercise power. We all yearn for material goods, the gratification of desire, and to put ourselves before others, yet we cannot always successfully vent these urges. In place of getting what we want, we want to control those urges, or, even more so, deny that we should have or even do have these desires. According to Nietzsche, we are “designating the ineluctably natural as bad.” Religion designates part of our nature as thoroughly bad. This was the beginning of a thought that would come to fruition in On the Genealogy of Morality, where Nietzsche claimed to have uncovered the psychology behind modern Western morality, and we shall look more closely at this idea when we come to that work.
It is, however, in Part 2, “On the natural history of moral sensation,” where the central focus is morality, and this part shows Rée’s influence to its greatest extent. Like Nietzsche’s approach to religion, which seeks to explain by an appeal to psychology various religious beliefs and practices, he attempted to elucidate moral beliefs and practices psychologically, also exposing false interpretations of moral feelings. One putative error that Nietzsche claimed to have uncovered in HAH is the idea that we act solely for the interests of another person without any regard to our own needs. A truly moral action, therefore, is one that is “unegoistic.” Nietzsche was very skeptical that such selfless actions exist, partly because of his diagnosis of asceticism that we touched above. But he also argued that even when one apparently acts in an altruistic way—that is, out of sole concern for another—we nevertheless act out of our own desires, our own inclinations, and our own values. “No one,” he wrote, “has ever done anything that was solely for the sake of another and without a personal motive.” This, however, is not Nietzsche at his best. It is perfectly true that we act out of our own desires, but that doesn’t mean that those desires are desires for us. For instance, if a parent desires his son to succeed in life, he is not desiring something for himself but rather for his child.
A more significant error in morality for Nietzsche is the connection between moral feelings and the notion of free will. When we blame or praise a person, we feel we are justified in doing so because we think the person could have done something other than they did. We find someone accountable for an action only when that action is freely done. Fred could have kept the money for himself, instead of giving it to the beggar, or Mabel could have not stolen. We should only praise or blame an action when it is done from free will, and we only have free will when we could have done otherwise than what we actually did. But if we are really just complex natural, or biological creatures, then what we do is simply an outcome of natural process; we are no more able to do otherwise than what we actually do than a tree is free not to shed its leaves. The feeling of accountability, Nietzsche thought, is a mistaken interpretation of our nature, writing in HAH 1:39 that “[n]o one is accountable for his deeds. This is set against Kant’s moral philosophy which saw the human being as somehow beyond the realm of natural causality and able to act freely. This denial of accountability, Nietzsche noted,
is the bitterest draught the man of knowledge has to swallow…. [a]ll his evaluations, all his feelings of respect and antipathy have thereby become disvalued and false (HAH, 1, 107)
But Nietzsche didn’t simply leave us with the taste of the bitterest draught in our mouths. He offers us a new way of thinking, or at least the beginnings of one. We have inherited erroneous attitudes towards the others and ourselves; the latter including guilt and failure to do what we should have done. We have also, as I mentioned above in relation to asceticism, condemned some of our natural instincts (we are “designating the ineluctably natural as bad”). Nietzsche hoped that in exposing the falsity of these views, his philosophy could contribute to “a new habit” of “surveying” ourselves, so it might bring forth the “wise, innocent … man.” Right now, we are the “unwise, unjust, guilt-conscious” human beings (HAH, 1, 107), but the solution to our predicament doesn’t lie in becoming wise, just, or guilt-free. Our present morality is riddled with mistakes and false assumptions. Nietzsche hoped that once abandoned, a new morality would take its place.
Free spirits and other concepts
But what “new morality”? And for whom? Let us begin with the second question. The subtitle of HAH is “A Book for Free Spirits.” Who are these? Part 5 of HAH, “Tokens of Higher and Lower Culture” gives us some indication of their identity. First, they are exceptional and rare. Second, the “freedom” of the free spirit is not, of course, the free will that Nietzsche squarely rejected. Instead, what makes a free spirit free is freedom from the constraints of morality. The free spirit “has liberated himself from tradition” (HAH 1 225). This, of course, is a descendant of the great individuals of the Untimely Meditations. One aspect of this freedom is freedom from the interpretation of morality as the demand for selflessness. The free spirit should “manipulate falsehood, force, the most ruthless self-interest as his instruments so skilfully he could only be called an evil, demonic being; but his objectives, which shine through here and there, would be great and good” (HAH 1 241). The free spirit knows enough of his nature and the grounds of present culture to “overcome” his own nature and that culture.
One might wonder what the positive content of the values of the “free spirit” are. They are free from the culture of morality and aim at the “great and the good,” but it is far from clear just what the “great and the good” is supposed to consist of. This will remain somewhat of a puzzle in understanding Nietzsche, though we shall make some progress in later chapters. But there is also a different evaluative dimension that makes its presence felt, namely a contrast between the “healthy” and “sick.” A section entitled “Of the future of the physician,” suggests that in the promotion of the free spirit, there is a need for someone who can offer “benevolent amputation of all the so-called torments of the soul and pangs of conscience” (HAH 1 243). This presumes that “sickness” in this context is a matter of psychological disturbance: humans are sick when they torment themselves psychologically, and our present morality somehow contributes to this torment. The free spirit becomes “healthy” when such torments are removed. This theme is picked up and amplified in the 1886 Preface to the second volume of HAH. As Nietzsche noted in that preface, the contents of the whole work comprise “precepts of health that may be recommended to the more spiritual natures of the generation just coming up.”
