Finding a Form (17 page)

The ultimate issue is an ancient one, which Nietzsche’s hyperbolic rhetoric inflates but whose enlargement reveals a fatal equivocation. We are carried in the womb like pooches on a cushion, but after that the encounters of our wishes with the world are often as painful and damaging as the collision of cars. Sometimes we find it simpler to alter the world, bend it to our will (in which case we aspire to be masters of it, and call our knowledge of it “power”); however, we may instead find it advisable to alter ourselves, to redefine, redirect, or set aside our desires (in which case we shall seem to submit like slaves). What is critical is how correctly (and courageously) we understand our powers, and whether we are willing to generalize our condition and make a habit of our responses. If we are Stoics, we shall feel we can command nothing of the world and at best but a bit of ourselves. Tamburlaines may, for a while at least, have larger visions, more confident and grander aims. Frequently, unable to take matters into our own hands, like subtle Figaros, we manipulate the hands where matters do rest,
managing ordinary men by means of bribery, blackmail, seduction, denial, and nagging; kings and queens by flattery, scheming, treachery, and petition; and the gods through priests, sacrifices, and by prayer. Our characters congeal around our choices, and our moralities make the best of it. So some of us grow up small boys, arrogant and imperious, inclined to throw tantrums when our wills are thwarted; others of us feast on renunciation, fattening our spirits until they poke from our bodies as our bones do; still others go about kowtowing to circumstances, crying that “what will be, will be,” like the reassuring chirp of birds; or we sing instead the song the sirens sang, make an art of our passivity, prepare our bodies to be as drawn on as banks, and open our legs there like a purse.

Any observant childhood will confirm the fact that there is scarcely a crime that does not wear some virtue’s face, or a virtue that isn’t inwardly villainous. Nor is there a familiar moral quality we haven’t long found the cliché’s contempt for. In Nietzsche’s case, these were principally, and most immediately, obedience, piety, chastity, modesty, neatness, industry, sacrifice, and service. Later mercy, pity, and sympathy would be added. Bullied by benevolence, the young are routinely made victims of virtue, and it does not take them long to realize, as they are forced to internalize their obligations, what other interests these serve: that stinginess becomes frugality in straitened circumstances, that honesty is a kind of spiritual disarmament which traffics, at the same time, in the brutalities of frankness, that neatness is an enemy of history and change, or that a disdain for frivolity is a form of fear. The traits that gain the medal for goodness do not make their owners lively or attractive persons. It is wit and energy, quickness and sensitivity, responsiveness and enthusiasm, skill and daring, we warm to—signs of vitality, in short—not the dozens of “do nots,” however wholesomely embodied, which the authorities have thought up for their profit.

We become Stoics (if that is where we end up) not because reality is good and relentlessly rational, but because we feel powerless
to affect events and are willing to be put in our place like a knickknack on a shelf, to cover ourselves, like our eventual graves, with dust. If we have to accept what we get, why not imagine that it’s just what we want? Our early sense of the injustice of justice will soon be driven off with kicks and curses, like a stray, to be replaced by a blindfolded figure holding scales. Another scenario has us advising one reddened cheek to offer the other, since such a gesture calms the smiting palm, decreasing the slaps of our masters; and we celebrate humility and obedience for the same wise reasons of weakness. Thus—and inevitably—the strong promote programs of exercise for themselves while recommending rest to everybody else; the cerebral study chess and pretend its bloodless board is one of battle; while wimps practice patience, servility, and patriotism. Nietzsche bit our values as if they were suspicious coins and left in each of them the indentation of his teeth, because, for him, only the hard, not the soft, was genuine.

At sixteen or seventeen, a passage like this one from
Human, All Too Human
will read like a truth table; or, perhaps one should say, it ought to:

In Nietzsche’s case, disillusionment (of which he became the magician in chief) seems to have been a gradual, even a gentle process, despite the “shock of recognition” just described. He is sent to Schulpforta, a fine school, where he is a successful student; his mother watches his progress with a wary but deferential eye, and his sister dotes. Adolescent ambitions, inflated dreams, a not unmerited conceit, continue into middle age. His ideas will undergo a radical change, but the metamorphosis of his emotions will be incomplete. Nietzsche offers his worship, his belief, with a youthful—though, later, a suspicious—ease, only to withdraw his injured soul as if his body has been burned. He will idolize anything—a field of endeavor, a period of history, ideas and individuals—and each with equal ardency, only to see them come up short when measured, not only against his own over-the-rainbow expectations, but against the far more agreeable standards they set for themselves and claim to meet.

Nietzsche is headed for the clergy, of course, but he applies the critical methods of research, then popular at his school in the study of the classics, to traditional Biblical texts (much as an early hero
of his, David Strauss, had done in his revisionist
Life of Jesus
), and with predictably catastrophic results, too, because secular techniques will secularize their object, just as the Cabalistic methods of the Deconstructionists allow their hermeneutical suspect to confess to any crime; but his disaster had its own thrill, like Samson bringing down the temple, because Nietzsche now had the inside dope, the lowdown on those high ideals, and could wear his intellectual superiority as a medal. It became difficult, in Nietzsche’s eyes, for a social form or a system of ideas to escape its origins, however hard it struggled, and this allegedly scientific, etymological method gave God’s Word a natural source, an all too human mouth.

Although every philosopher has a hometown, time of life, and troubles, and no one is so naive as to imagine these may not intrude upon, deflect, or aim his work, philosophical ideas and their development are traditionally not supposed to stand or fall upon the character of their source or the environment of their birth, even though a knowledge of both may help us understand the philosopher’s point of view; nevertheless, Nietzsche (like Socrates) will not allow his work to be adopted like a stray dog looking for a home. Philosophical positions should not pop up like billboards along the highway (
PLOTINUS IS THE ONE
!) (
PLATO HAS THE FORMS
!), as if an ad had been sent from an agency on high, or the message were pretending to be a pronouncement of Reason itself. Nietzsche wishes to persuade us, certainly, but not to think what he has thought or write what he has written; rather, he wants us to
do
what he has
done
(an attitude shared, apparently, by the later Wittgenstein). He wants us to become an exceptional kind of
self
, so that our speech and writing may have an exceptional sort of
source
. It is a quintessentially romantic attitude.

Most of his arguments appear in the form of parables, and much of his evidence is obtained from his profound understanding of himself as a psychological subject. It is not characteristic of philosophers to be so personal or concrete. In the passage I just quoted, we have only to measure our own rough awakening with the one it
describes in order to accept or reject the account in general terms—hardly a decisive method of demonstration, yet, after all, something. David Hume, that renowned empiricist, looked into himself, by my count, only once, and failed to find an impression he could call “David”; the remainder of his evidence derives, as is so often the case, not from the sensations he esteems, but from the shortcomings of his forerunners—or forestumblers, as they always turn out to be. Nietzsche is neither genially sloppy in the gentlemanly-English and cultivated-amateur manner, nor ponderously solemn and cloudy in the professorial-German style. Is he, in fact, a philosopher at all? Perhaps he is a kulturkritik.

Some of the sophists peeved Plato; there is no doubt about it. Envy and malice and petty spite are not unknown among philosophers, who have aimed many a low blow at one another, made snide remarks, and written splendidly caustic pages. F. H. Bradley and George Santayana were two of our better mudslingers. But their sense of disgust or superiority—Bradley’s toward Mill, for instance—is not a functional part of their philosophy. Having exposed the shallowness of Mill’s mind by traditional philosophical arguments (presumably), Bradley then paddles the puddle as if it were an errant pupil’s backside. Nietzsche, on the other hand, is anger and outrage; he wants to hear idols break; he wants to cry out, as Amos did, that “God spits upon your sacrifices!” People are to wake up to the pain of their oppression, the shame of their exploitation; they are to understand the campaigns of hypocrisy being waged against them; they are to stop following false prophets, and listen to Zarathustra. Passion, not thought alone, inks his pages. Dismay, exasperation, anger, outrage, disgust, humiliation, disappointment: they fuel his philosophy, and it is little without them. Exhilaration, joy, exuberance, excess: they feed it too. How he hates being duped, being lied to. Especially by himself. How he loves life when his headaches will let him.

So to write about Nietzsche, as is naturally and normally done, in a scholarly, sobersided manner, analytically, striving for cool clarity and academic understanding, or unhistorically, as if ideas
were blossoms which never saw stems, is already to deny him his claims and fall foul of his criticisms. To write about him in the Germanized French fashion now popular, or to Heideggerize him, is to tarnish his gleam and cover his confusions with confusion. The very pomposities he punctured now surround him with an atmosphere of self-serving artifice.

Gilles Deleuze, for instance, in an essay anthologized by David Allison
(The New Nietzsche)
, writes about Nietzsche in a style at once pretentious and barbaric:

“Big books are big sins,” David Krell observes in his study
Postponements: Woman, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche
, “but big books about Nietzsche are a far more pernicious affair: they are breaches of good taste.” On the other hand, to adopt his style, to mimic his manias—who would dare? how could that be done? and would it not mean an unhealthy (certainly un-Nietzschean) submission?

Although not a gifted linguist, Nietzsche made an exceptionally rapid advance across his chosen field, for he was offered a professorship even before he had received his degree—an unheard-of honor, and one that consoled his mother for the loss of the son she hoped would be a pastor. In short, the scholarly road was open, and Nietzsche could have been swallowed and digested by the system as easily as a raisin in bread pudding. But he had discovered Schopenhauer, and soon Wagner, the classical Greek world, was more real to him than the god of Bach, the god of his father. Nietzsche’s musical compositions were rarely esteemed, but he hammered away at the piano impressively and could lose himself
in a crowd of notes, becoming as noble and energetic and poetic as they were, sweeping forward like the force of the will itself through the pure space of the spirit.

Wagner’s pagan use of the pagan gods, his nationalism and the notion that one is best fed through one’s roots, his overwhelming oceanic style and totalitarian dream of an encompassing art, above all his depiction of even godlike life as a contest, sometimes between primitive forces, sometimes at the more sophisticated level of song itself: all these appealed mightily to Nietzsche, especially when they were as palpably embodied as they were in the composer, or so solidly set forth in the composer’s roosterlike sense of himself, where no barnyard was big enough, no walk that wide. They appealed for reasons that never reached reason, really, but, as Nietzsche himself suspected, expressed the longing that ran the length of his character—the length of his life—and essentially shaped his philosophical disposition.