Business, party, family, foxhole
An addendum on Nietzsche
Dear H,
In my last essay about Nietzsche I forgot to mention one final (and extreme) irony: the fact that Nietzsche saw a horse getting whipped, and freaked out so badly that he turned into a vegetable.
Thus Nietzsche became an exception to his own rule. Not only did he prove that sometimes what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; but he showed that after all he said about pity and pain, things like,
Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful men and peoples, and ask yourself: can a tree grow proud and tall without storms and inclemency? Disregard and opposition, all sorts of obstinacy, cruelty, greed, distrust, jealousy, hatred and violence — are these not among the favourable circumstances without which great growth, even in virtue, is scarcely possible? The poison by which the weaker natures perish strengthens the strong — and they do not call it poison.
— after all this (mostly true) you-can-do-it manly rah-rah, I tell you, it turned out he wasn’t preaching to us so much as he was preaching to himself. Most (if not all) sermons and philosophy are ours, in a sense, as he taught — a holy salvo of the preacher, by the preacher, and for the preacher. Which means they have a strong whiff of the personal, the subjective, and the lop-sided — a single man’s perspective on what he needs, and what he wants, and what he fears. And Nietzsche was no exception to the rule*. The entire time he was telling us to be tough it was because he knew he was too soft.
In the end he got his ass kicked by a whimper. And this herald of the Superman — the one who refuses to call suffering an evil, who plows through pain and pity alike, who marches to his own drum, and who bulldozes past the common herd — was felled by an extreme case of the herd instinct. He saw an animal crying, and wanted to cradle it in his arms.
He made fun of women for wanting to coddle us and lived out his last years — if it can be called living — being babied by a woman. Which is the same end (and the same beginning) decreed by God for most of us. But we get cocky, and forget that so-called independence and strength (and their corollary, pride) are only for the middle years: a short flowering which gets cut down, in its prime, by the first frosts of an approaching winter**.
Nietzsche made the Superman too abstruse anyway, I think. Being able to give and take a beating is a big part of it, of course. But in the end, what is being a great man? Just being somebody’s first pick in a business, a party, a family, and a foxhole.
You fail to be #1 to somebody in each of these categories and you’re not really superior at all. The Superman can’t be superior to any thing unless he’s a good fit for someone. Our value is never determined by what we “are.” What we are has always been determined by what we do. That and how we make somebody close to us feel. If you want to be a Superman, don’t see how many times you can get kicked in the pants. Start by finding out how to be a great husband, or a great dad.
One more thing should be said here. When I said people find meanings in Nietzsche’s writings because they think they’re supposed to find meanings, that isn’t really such a bad thing. Having faith in a writer is the only reason anyone picks up any books at all. It’s also why we go to church and read the Bible.
A man who has faith may be young and naive. But because he believes, he grapples with a passage, wrestles with it, twists and tumbles with it, until, like Jacob, the angel gives him a blessing — and a new name. (There’s also a time when you think you’re wrestling with an angel and it turns out to be a retard, or a lunatic. There are “beer goggles” of the spirit, and only experience can save you from them).
The author of the Book of Hebrews writes,
For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
But the Bible is alive, in great part, only because we are alive. Faith is the medium through which God delivers meaning. It causes us to seek and it causes us to find. And I believe the same is true, on a much smaller scale, with Nietzsche. The loss of faith in either The Bible or Beyond Good and Evil never meant they failed us. Many times, it means we failed them.
Yours,
-J
P.S. One of my favorite instances of a brilliant man struggling with a “B.S.” passage is CS Lewis writing in Reflections on the Psalms. Especially those passages that say things like, happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them upon the rocks,
It seems that there is a general rule in the moral universe which may be formulated “The higher, the more in danger”. The “average sensual man” who is sometimes unfaithful to his wife, sometimes tipsy, always a little selfish, now and then (within the law) a trifle sharp in his deals, is certainly, by ordinary standards, a “lower” type than the man whose soul is filled with some great Cause, to which he will subordinate his appetites, his fortune, and even his safety. But it is out of the second man that something really fiendish can be made; an Inquisitor, a Member of the Committee of Public Safety. It is great men, potential saints, not little men, who become merciless fanatics. Those who are readiest to die for a cause may easily become those who are readiest to kill for it. […]
The higher the stakes, the greater the temptation to lose your temper over the game. We must not over-value the relative harmlessness of the little, sensual, frivolous people. They are not above, but below, some temptations.
Lewis reminds me that we’re saved (many times) by our vices just as much as by our virtues. So yes, maybe a keen sense of justice kept us from doing evil. But so have laziness, and fickleness, and cowardice. We have probably been saved more times by procrastination than by the Holy Spirit. Simply put, we get tired of an evil dream because we took too many cat-naps, and never saw it to fruition. We were never good enough to be really horrible. As Rochefoucauld puts it, many of our virtues are simply vices in disguise.
Lewis adds, maybe more insightfully,
The Jews sinned in this matter worse than the Pagans not because they were further from God but because they were nearer to Him. For the Supernatural, entering a human soul, opens to it new possibilities both of good and evil. From that point the road branches: one way to sanctity, love, humility, the other to spiritual pride, self-righteousness, persecuting zeal. And no way back to the mere humdrum virtues and vices of the unawakened soul. If the Divine call does not make us better, it will make us very much worse. Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst. Of all created beings the wickedest is one who originally stood in the immediate presence of God.
And how did I find these passages — which there are many more of in the book? Not because I had any faith in the angry Psalms, but because I had faith in C.S. Lewis.
*Is it such a surprise that Nietzsche got bit by the pitbull he was walking? Jordan B Peterson preached the Alpha Male and, despite spiritual hardiness, found his body couldn’t keep up with him. Karl Marx preached against selfishness and we found he couldn’t take care of his own family. Ayn Rand preached for selfishness, as a means to happiness, and we found she wasn't happy. Solomon preached self-control and we found he didn’t have any. The man who posts success quotes is almost always a failure in business. The woman who “hates drama” is almost always a bitch.
With any good sermon it’s hard to tell whether the preacher is driving the bus or just hit by it. We found something in ourselves that was lacking, that was hurting, that we hate — and instead of turning our guns inward, we take them out on the universe. Because the universe had already pulled guns on us first.
**Samuel Johnson writes, in the Rambler, about how seriously everyone takes the truism "life is short,”
if my readers will turn their thoughts back upon their old friends, they will find it difficult to call a single man to remembrance, who appeared to know that life was short till he was about to lose it.
***As usual, Nietzsche, seeing the cracks in his own foundation, counter-poises one statement to another:
There is as much wisdom in pain as in pleasure: like pleasure, pain represents a power for the preservation of the species of the first order. Were it not so, pain itself would have perished long ago; that it hurts is no argument against it: it is its very essence. In pain I hear the commanding call of the ship’s captain: ‘Take in the sails!’ The bold seafarer known as ‘man’ must have learned to set his sails in a thousand different ways, otherwise he could not have lasted long, for the ocean would soon have swallowed him up. We must also know how to live with diminished energies: as soon as pain gives its danger signal, it is time to diminish them – some great danger, some storm, is approaching, and we would do well to ‘fill the sails’ as little as possible.
And I criticized him for not seeing how success breeds failure, but in The Will to Power, he writes of decadence — not as a sign of ruin, but of success,
The phenomenon of decadence is as necessary as any increase and advance of life: one is in no position to abolish it.
Reason demands, on the contrary, that we do justice to it. It is a disgrace for all socialist systematizers that they suppose there could be circumstances — social combinations — in which vice, disease, prostitution, distress would no longer grow. But that means condemning life — A society is not free to remain young. And even at the height of its strength it has to form refuse and waste materials. The more energetically and boldly it advances, the richer it will be in failures and deformities, the closer to decline. Age is not abolished by means of institutions. Neither is disease. Nor vice.
Thus we attack Nietzsche's position — and only shortly thereafter, we find he’d already attacked it himself. He was spring and summer, fall and winter. We think we’ve caught him in one of spring's follies, only to find that he was seasons ahead of us — and had already dropped the leaves we thought we’d catch from his branches.