Friedrich Nietzsche is my favorite writer and thinker.
A superficial part of me wishes I could say someone else, some other inspiring author with too much common touch to be dismissed as merely academic or oddball. Fans of difficult and unpopular dead white men arouse suspicions of posturing, as eccentric or smart. Sometimes these suspicions are dead-on.
Sometimes not.
The labels that dog and shame Nietzsche lovers are excessive. Stereotypes hijack his genius and taunt sympathetic readers—first as fascists and nowadays as dabblers at this thing called thinking.
As I re-read the Gay Science, I know I’m not the only defensive fan out there. Walter Kaufmann—prominent dead Anglo theologian and Nietzsche translator nonpareil—was, throughout his life, at great pains to rescue the misjudged moustachioed polemicist. There are about a dozen places in each translated work in which Herr Genius bristles against dogma or anti-Semitism, and, at each point, commentator Kaufmann is quick with a “Look! Again, not a Nazi!” His unending string of footnotes is distracting, often incorrect and entirely necessary to remind the reader that the brilliant mind behind the thoughts is more than a mere nutcase pushing for God’s death at the hands of racist supermen. That’s the old stereotype.
The new stereotype is adolescent angst. Think of the insufferable colorblind mute teenager in Little Miss Sunshine, whose Nietzsche obsession is amusing and nothing more than pubertal. Think Fight Club wannabes.
I got the slightest whiff of the new stereotype a couple nights ago when a friend and I were discussing books and he was surprised I said Nietzsche was my favorite writer (“You mean thinker?”). He then added that he had read him years ago and didn’t remember a thing about him. I could see someone not respecting him, but to not remember his ideas is inexcusable.
Exhibit A, Nietzsche is a good writer: Nietzsche writing on writing (all italics his):
"Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts! It was not long ago that you were still so colorful, young, and malicious, full of thorns and secret spices—you made me sneeze and laugh—and now? You have already taken off your novelty, and some of you are ready, I fear, to become truths: they already look so immortal, so pathetically decent, so dull! And has it ever been different? What things do we copy, writing and painting, we mandarins with Chinese brushes, we immortalizers of things that can be written—what are the only things we are able to paint? Always, always only what is on the verge of withering and losing its fragrance! Alas, always only storms that are passing, exhausted, and feelings that are autumnal and yellow! Alas, always only birds that grew weary of flying and flew astray and now can be caught by hand—by our hand! We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer—only weary and mellow things! And it is only your afternoon, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have colors, many colors perhaps, many motley caresses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds; but nobody will guess from that how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my beloved-wicked thoughts."
Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game) once said that metaphors hold the most truth in the least space. I think that’s a truth manifest in Nietzsche, on every page, and probably the reason Encyclopedia Britannica refers to him as the most brilliant German prose writer ever. His writing is what writing’s all about—an imparting of what you know of the overlap of beauty and truth, the seizure of that knowledge in its afternoon and the hurling of it onto paper, the placement of new days in someone else’s head. A man who knew that “whatever is said well is believed,” Nietzsche succeeded at writing as well as possible.
The masterful use of English language above owes partly to the devoted Kaufman at work, something won in translation. It was Kaufmann’s intention to capture the “dance” of Nietzsche’s language that had been lost in prior editions.
So I’m reading Nietzsche again. He’s been my main man since college, and after the Vipassana retreat, I felt a faint need for guidance.
***
Digression: It’s interesting to think that Nietzsche may be the closest person I have to a role model.
Disclaimer: I’m not trying to be pretentious.
I don’t feel I had any real role model growing up. I had lots of partial ones throughout my fortunate childhood. There’s my dad, who’s pretty unbeatable for girls advice, and mom, who’s great for jobs advice, and Bruce, one of the happiest and smartest people I know who acted almost as a third parent and often helped me to deal with the other two. There’s my friend Will, an army of activism and a charity fund in himself, who I often ask to double as my conscience. I can go on and on.
I see no reason dead people couldn’t also count, at least by the way I judge them:
Let Role Model, RM, be a product, where RM = G*R*A*(E-iT), where G is “genius,” R the “relevance of ideas to Charles,” A “accomplishments in life,” E “empathy” and iT “Intolerance.” Genius is the nearly impossible insight, the more improbably well put the better. The difference E-iT is, effectively, self-overcoming, which, when multiplied against A, represents life worth, the “model” half of role model. This formula’s pretty good for having just come up with it. In fact, it’s close to great—get it?
All these variables can be on a scale of 1-10, if you wish. If no mere mortal can score a perfect 10-to-the-fourth, then Nietzsche comes close to immortality, at least via Charles Role Model Algebra. His hatred of women, perhaps, lends a detracting iT of “2,” a value that'd be higher if he hadn’t tempered his chauvinism as a metaphor for truth (“Supposing truth were a woman, what then?” etc).
His genius receives a rare 10, reserved for the likes of Einstein and Shakespeare. I won’t go into why here, that requires too much for a blog entry. I can say that, of any thinker—alive or dead, author or other—I agree with him the most. And he contributes the most thoughts to my brain that I wouldn’t possess otherwise. I admire his perspectivism and his compassion, the latter dressed up in so much seeming malice as to require the undressing process of multiple reads. And his life itself—his decade of staggering triumphs over horrible illness after horrible illness before finally going completely insane thanks to tertiary syphilis—sets fire to his words, after the book is put down.
During weak times I find I can turn to his texts, probably in a manner analogous to how religious people revere their own sacred books, though I revere nothing sacred or perfect about Nietzsche. When someone attacks his worth, I hide a feeling inside similar to wanting to defend a father-figure, not a God.
I’m sure you feel the same about some book or song. That’s just how it goes, it is what it is.
***
As Nietzsche said of himself, I, too, read myself into books because “I clearly need some help.”
So I’m reading The Gay Science right now, again, and he’s already reignited in me an exuberance unto surrender, something I thought would be immediate at Vipassana. His writing isn’t just acrobatics, made up of audacious synonyms and inspired metaphors, more common in fiction than non. It’s an uncluttering of my thoughts through their rearrangement. And then I realize I’m wearing yet another ridiculous mask. A shield of humor that conceals envy, an armor of strength concealing nothing but---it's not just about me or you, of course. There’s more reflected in his mirror than any one individual. He just sometimes makes the planet seem that small.
Why the old stereotype took hold is easy enough: his estranged sister Elisabeth was married to an actual proto-Nazi. Upon his madness and death, she did a good job whittling down the universe of her brother’s thought, diminished it enough to fit into a tiny totalitarian hole. He was posthumously born under Axis flags.
In his postwar rebirth, Nietzsche somehow got saddled with the new stereotype, and how this happened is for someone else to explain. Its an exaggeration to say that the man needs a third incarnation, but a Kaufman 2007 couldn’t hurt, a translator to make Nietzsche okay again, someone accepted by people of all intellects and ages, like John Lennon or Ray Romano, someone to see and to say “Look! Again, not juvenile! In fact, he’s much, much smarter than you!”
Here are some new favorite quotes from the first fifty pages of The Gay Science. These resonate with me, now.
Since I grew tired of the chase
And search; I learned to find;
And since the wind blows in my face,
I sail with every wind
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. To be annoyed or feel remorse because something goes wrong—that he leaves to those who act because they have received orders and who have to reckon with a beating when his lordship is not satisfied with the result.
(This naturally brings me back to Thoughts and Opinions on Vipassana. Success is a yes, failure a no. Experiences are too often mistaken for more than they are—for mistakes, disservices to inner royalty.)
Pain always raises the question about its origin while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself without looking back.
(Is gratitude the consciousness of happiness, the concluded investigation into the origin of pleasure?)
Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months and some more distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.
(Is this the limit of love of all types, or the limit of infatuation? Or desire?)
What we know about ourselves and remember is not so decisive for the happiness of our life as people suppose. One day that which others know about us (or think they know) assaults us—and then we realize that this is more powerful. It is easier to cope with a bad conscience than to cope with a bad reputation.
Half of your life is done,
And it was pain and error, through and through:
Why do you still seek on?
Precisely this I seek: The reason why!
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