Post by Emperor AAdmin on Aug 13, 2005 15:44:57 GMT -5
'Friedrich Nietzsche': The Constructive Nihilist
By WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN
Published: August 14, 2005
PERHAPS genius can be perceived no way but kaleidoscopically, with interpretation endlessly rearranging the same bright shards. Who was Nietzsche? ''Listen!'' he shouts at the beginning of ''Ecce Homo,'' and the italics are naturally his, he being the emperor of vehemency. ''For I am such and such a person. For heaven's sake do not confound me with anyone else.'' The chapter titles then explain even more about him: ''Why I Am So Wise,'' ''Why I Am So Clever,'' ''Why I Write Such Excellent Books.'' Our immediate reaction, as he might have intended, is to suspect the wisdom, cleverness and excellence of ''such a person's'' books.
Josh Cochran
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
By Curtis Cate.
Illustrated. 689 pp. The Overlook Press. $37.50.
Josh Cochran
Nietzsche was born in Rocken, Prussia, in 1844, and died, having gone insane, in 1900. He was educated at Bonn and Leipzig and was self-educated (and dis-educated) thereafter. But who, really, was he?
Heidegger is onto something when he advises us that philosophy can be possessed ''most purely in the form of a persistent question,'' and that ''Nietzsche's procedure, his manner of thinking in the execution of the new valuation, is perpetual reversal,'' perhaps like life itself, not to mention Heidegger's own devoted explications of Nietzsche. That arch-muse Lou Salomé, who knew him not only as a thought machine but also as a lover of sorts, stated the case more intimately when she wrote, ''In Nietzsche the most abstract thoughts habitually could reverse themselves into the power of moods which could carry him off with immediate and unpredictable force.''
Ecce homo, behold the man! As we peer down time's long barrel to try to see him, his hand keeps turning the kaleidoscope.
Curtis Cate's new biography assists in the beholding, by rebuilding who Nietzsche was out of as many shards as possible, retelling his life in vivid snatches while presenting the labors of his mind. As Nietzsche would have informed us, such a project cannot but be a failure, yet what a pleasing and admirable failure it is! Anyone who summarizes in a handful of pages, as Cate has bravely done, not only each of Nietzsche's books but the relevant aspects of Schopenhauer, Aristotle and others by whom Nietzsche was influenced and against whom he reacted, is asking the world to pick nits. Nits will be picked. No matter. This is a warmly intelligent introduction to Nietzsche.
Any decent biography is a work of drama. What then are the dramatic moments of Nietzsche's life, the ones we most anticipate the telling of and judge the biographer by? Well, obviously the Nietzsche-Wagner friendship and its end is such a moment. The romance with Lou Salomé is another. Then there's the tumble into madness and the relationship with his sister Elisabeth, who disarmingly tells us that ''the fact that I had spent the greater part of my life in the company of so superior a person as my brother robbed me of . . . self-confidence'' and who found the confidence nonetheless to refashion her brother's image to suit her ends. Finally, there's Nietzsche's moment of responsibility, hypothetical or not, for the intellectual climate that brought about National Socialism. How well does Cate do in regard to each of these?
Start with Wagner. Cate brings him alive in all his titanic egotism and ambition. We come to understand, and perhaps to be touched by, the composer's notion that the opera house built to his specifications at Bayreuth could actually raise the level of German culture. In this context, Nietzsche's wavering impulse to sacrifice his philology professorship to stump for Wagner's project makes amusing sense.
Here and everywhere, Cate succeeds in exciting our compassion for his hero. Particularly moving is the spectacle of a savagely independent intellect, whose utterances are so fiery that they should have been printed in red ink, abasing itself to timidly ask the Wagners' permission to play its own composition on the piano, a piece that finds no favor with them.
H. L. Mencken, who wrote an introduction to the published Nietzsche-Wagner correspondence, considers it ''quite possible,'' as Elisabeth opined, ''that it was Wagner's snuffling gabble about Christianity that finished'' the friendship. ''After those walks at Sorrento there was nothing for'' Nietzsche ''to do save make his bow, click his heels together and say goodbye.'' Cate shows that it was over before then, faithfully detailing the gradual widening of the personal, moral and aesthetic gulf between the two men. Liberal quotations help us feel some of the complexities -- for instance, Nietzsche's poignant claim that ''it was the aging Wagner I had to resist: as regards the authentic Wagner, I will to a good extent become his heir.''
Now, what about Salomé, that hourglass-waisted Russian girl in the dark dress who inspired Nietzsche's attempt to be bravely nonconformist in action as well as in thought -- and who hurt him so deeply?
Her ménage with Nietzsche and their mutual friend Paul Rée was supposed to be platonic. Excluding a hand-kiss or two, it was, at least between Salomé and Nietzsche -- just as well, since our hero must have had syphilis in his bloodstream by then, a possible souvenir of his time spent as a medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War. At any rate, the end was as hindsight-predictable as the end of the Nietzsche-Wagner friendship. There quickly came the moment when Salomé stormed at Elisabeth: ''It was your noble, pure-minded brother who first had the filthy intention of a wild marriage!'' -- meaning a more physical ménage. (Well, why not? Nietzsche would ultimately reject Plato.)
Unfortunately, Cate fails in both charity and justice to Salomé, a brilliant woman whose books about Nietzsche and Rilke I have read with great admiration. Repeatedly dismissing her with the adjectives ''narcissistic'' and ''willful,'' he finds it sufficient to tell the story thus: Her father was a ''god on earth'' type, and Nietzsche's romantic timidity disappointed her expectation of ''the kind of man-god-on-earth Lou secretly craved to meet (and also feared as a challenge to her intellectual 'freedom').'' It's likely she did lead Nietzsche on, but he played a similarly unexalted part in the affair, and at the end he was peppering her with pompous threats: ''If I now reject you, it is a terrible verdict on your entire being.'' Salomé was more than a spoiled, neurotic 19th-century bimbo, and Cate should have quoted from the analysis of Nietzsche she published in 1894. After all, he'd revealed his soul to her! Here is one of her insights: ''All his thinking had a forceful impact upon his inner life, so that the fullness of the inward and contending experiences threatened to burst the circumscribed boundaries of his personality.'' This sentence hauntingly yet compassionately encompasses not only Nietzsche's inadequacy as a lover but also his final madness.
This gruesome end Cate details understatedly, and his book builds up to it with equally understated anecdote. Heidegger refers to 1887 as ''the year in which everything about him radiates an excessive brilliance and in which therefore at the same time a terrible boundlessness advances out of the distance.'' Cate's account is more muted. Between the lines I sense a sincere sadness and discomfort about what became of Nietzsche, whom the author so clearly reveres.
When he turns his attention to Elisabeth, once again Cate is taciturn, perhaps out of embarrassment. Most of the time she's not much more than ''his efficient sister Elisabeth,'' who rents apartments for him, reads to him, etc. What did her brother really feel for her? Was she essentially a convenience who at times became an annoyance? And how should we judge her? (A very un-Nietzschean question!) If we could better understand her, we might better be able to consider the related matter of Nietzsche's posthumous Nazi career.
The short version is this: As her brother turned ever more militantly against conventional pieties, then vainly dabbled with Lou Salomé, Elisabeth felt abandoned. Cate quotes this letter: ''I must now try to build a new kind of life-happiness, but oh, it is so difficult.'' A year later his shocking philosophy had begun to achieve a tincture of material and social success, at which point she called him ''a conqueror, mighty, magnificent!!'' Meanwhile, she built life-happiness with a more unequivocal anti-Semite, her husband, Bernhard Forster; became widowed; acquired financial obligations and met them while coincidentally becoming the keeper of her brother's flame.
Cate's empathy and sympathy for his subject make this a first-rate biography. But just as one can allow oneself to be spellbound by the plea of a defense lawyer without necessarily dismissing the prosecution's case, so one can admire Cate's loyalty to Nietzsche while declining to accompany the two of them into the elitist heights. Cate, who has written biographies not only of André Malraux and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry -- both brave in war, one passionately egotistical and the other fraternally moral -- but also, rather surprisingly, of George Sand, reveals his own biases honestly in the preface: ''It is easy to reproach Nietzsche for having . . . contributed to the deluge by weakening the floodgates of traditional morality. But the troubling question remains: what will happen to the Western world if the present drift cannot be halted, and to what sordid depths of pornographically publicized vulgarity will our shamelessly 'transparent' culture, or what remains of it, continue to descend?'' Pornographic vulgarian that I am, I feel skeptical that the level of culture was a great deal higher for most people in Nietzsche's time. There was better education to be found then, to be sure, but also more conventionality, more idols. Cate would halt Zarathustra's descent from the mountaintop; he has closed his ears to Nietzsche's announcement that God is dead, and long dead.
This brings us to the question that must be asked about Nietzsche in our post-Holocaust epoch. Cate admits that some of the philosopher's bellicose aphorisms had a ''fateful . . . impact . . . on future generations of 'disciples,' particularly in Germany.'' In World War I, 150,000 copies of ''Thus Spake Zarathustra'' were printed up for the Kaiser's army. The Nazis, for their part, distributed it to the Hitler Youth and laid a deluxe copy in the Tannenberg Memorial.
Was Nietzsche an anti-Semite? That depends on how one rotates the barrel of the kaleidoscope. Nietzsche was plentiful in his praises of individual Jews, as Cate eagerly proves. But the editor of the letters, who of course is Elisabeth, cannot deny that ''attacks upon the Jews are often to be found in his letters to Wagner which expressed Wagner's views on the subject rather than his own.'' What could her brother's motive have been? ''Hyper-courtesy,'' Elisabeth replies.
It simply can't be wished away that a philosophy among whose central tenets is that it not be applicable to most of us (''Where the people eats and drinks, even where it reveres, it usually stinks. . . . Indeed, a moral system valid for all is basically immoral''), a philosophy that smashes all existing idols and erects its own idol -- namely, a ''realism'' which asserts that cruelty, being innate, can be construed as moral -- becomes convenient to cruel elitists.
Our semi-invalid of an ex-professor in his blue-lensed spectacles was obviously a great man, a constructive nihilist. His bravery in this regard is a precursor to Freud's: sad and disgusting aspects of our humanness might as well be faced. As for tearing down idols, received wisdom does sour into unwisdom, so why not have a revolution every now and then? In 1874 Nietzsche imagined a Mephistophelean figure whose ''negation and destruction'' is actually ''an outpouring of that powerful longing for deliverance and salvation.'' He cannot be blamed for the literalized incarnation of that figure in Hitler, about whom he might (I hope) have written at least what he wrote about Wagner: ''That which intoxicates, the sensually ecstatic, the sudden surprise, the urge to be profoundly stirred at any price -- dreadful tendencies!'' Alas, Nietzsche exhibited some of those same tendencies -- for instance, the intoxication of deliberate irrationality. It was his posthumous misfortune, and perhaps his shame, to be appropriated by ruthless politicians in the service of literally murderous conformity.
William T. Vollmann's most recent book is ''Europe Central,'' a novel.
By WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN
Published: August 14, 2005
PERHAPS genius can be perceived no way but kaleidoscopically, with interpretation endlessly rearranging the same bright shards. Who was Nietzsche? ''Listen!'' he shouts at the beginning of ''Ecce Homo,'' and the italics are naturally his, he being the emperor of vehemency. ''For I am such and such a person. For heaven's sake do not confound me with anyone else.'' The chapter titles then explain even more about him: ''Why I Am So Wise,'' ''Why I Am So Clever,'' ''Why I Write Such Excellent Books.'' Our immediate reaction, as he might have intended, is to suspect the wisdom, cleverness and excellence of ''such a person's'' books.
Josh Cochran
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
By Curtis Cate.
Illustrated. 689 pp. The Overlook Press. $37.50.
Josh Cochran
Nietzsche was born in Rocken, Prussia, in 1844, and died, having gone insane, in 1900. He was educated at Bonn and Leipzig and was self-educated (and dis-educated) thereafter. But who, really, was he?
Heidegger is onto something when he advises us that philosophy can be possessed ''most purely in the form of a persistent question,'' and that ''Nietzsche's procedure, his manner of thinking in the execution of the new valuation, is perpetual reversal,'' perhaps like life itself, not to mention Heidegger's own devoted explications of Nietzsche. That arch-muse Lou Salomé, who knew him not only as a thought machine but also as a lover of sorts, stated the case more intimately when she wrote, ''In Nietzsche the most abstract thoughts habitually could reverse themselves into the power of moods which could carry him off with immediate and unpredictable force.''
Ecce homo, behold the man! As we peer down time's long barrel to try to see him, his hand keeps turning the kaleidoscope.
Curtis Cate's new biography assists in the beholding, by rebuilding who Nietzsche was out of as many shards as possible, retelling his life in vivid snatches while presenting the labors of his mind. As Nietzsche would have informed us, such a project cannot but be a failure, yet what a pleasing and admirable failure it is! Anyone who summarizes in a handful of pages, as Cate has bravely done, not only each of Nietzsche's books but the relevant aspects of Schopenhauer, Aristotle and others by whom Nietzsche was influenced and against whom he reacted, is asking the world to pick nits. Nits will be picked. No matter. This is a warmly intelligent introduction to Nietzsche.
Any decent biography is a work of drama. What then are the dramatic moments of Nietzsche's life, the ones we most anticipate the telling of and judge the biographer by? Well, obviously the Nietzsche-Wagner friendship and its end is such a moment. The romance with Lou Salomé is another. Then there's the tumble into madness and the relationship with his sister Elisabeth, who disarmingly tells us that ''the fact that I had spent the greater part of my life in the company of so superior a person as my brother robbed me of . . . self-confidence'' and who found the confidence nonetheless to refashion her brother's image to suit her ends. Finally, there's Nietzsche's moment of responsibility, hypothetical or not, for the intellectual climate that brought about National Socialism. How well does Cate do in regard to each of these?
Start with Wagner. Cate brings him alive in all his titanic egotism and ambition. We come to understand, and perhaps to be touched by, the composer's notion that the opera house built to his specifications at Bayreuth could actually raise the level of German culture. In this context, Nietzsche's wavering impulse to sacrifice his philology professorship to stump for Wagner's project makes amusing sense.
Here and everywhere, Cate succeeds in exciting our compassion for his hero. Particularly moving is the spectacle of a savagely independent intellect, whose utterances are so fiery that they should have been printed in red ink, abasing itself to timidly ask the Wagners' permission to play its own composition on the piano, a piece that finds no favor with them.
H. L. Mencken, who wrote an introduction to the published Nietzsche-Wagner correspondence, considers it ''quite possible,'' as Elisabeth opined, ''that it was Wagner's snuffling gabble about Christianity that finished'' the friendship. ''After those walks at Sorrento there was nothing for'' Nietzsche ''to do save make his bow, click his heels together and say goodbye.'' Cate shows that it was over before then, faithfully detailing the gradual widening of the personal, moral and aesthetic gulf between the two men. Liberal quotations help us feel some of the complexities -- for instance, Nietzsche's poignant claim that ''it was the aging Wagner I had to resist: as regards the authentic Wagner, I will to a good extent become his heir.''
Now, what about Salomé, that hourglass-waisted Russian girl in the dark dress who inspired Nietzsche's attempt to be bravely nonconformist in action as well as in thought -- and who hurt him so deeply?
Her ménage with Nietzsche and their mutual friend Paul Rée was supposed to be platonic. Excluding a hand-kiss or two, it was, at least between Salomé and Nietzsche -- just as well, since our hero must have had syphilis in his bloodstream by then, a possible souvenir of his time spent as a medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War. At any rate, the end was as hindsight-predictable as the end of the Nietzsche-Wagner friendship. There quickly came the moment when Salomé stormed at Elisabeth: ''It was your noble, pure-minded brother who first had the filthy intention of a wild marriage!'' -- meaning a more physical ménage. (Well, why not? Nietzsche would ultimately reject Plato.)
Unfortunately, Cate fails in both charity and justice to Salomé, a brilliant woman whose books about Nietzsche and Rilke I have read with great admiration. Repeatedly dismissing her with the adjectives ''narcissistic'' and ''willful,'' he finds it sufficient to tell the story thus: Her father was a ''god on earth'' type, and Nietzsche's romantic timidity disappointed her expectation of ''the kind of man-god-on-earth Lou secretly craved to meet (and also feared as a challenge to her intellectual 'freedom').'' It's likely she did lead Nietzsche on, but he played a similarly unexalted part in the affair, and at the end he was peppering her with pompous threats: ''If I now reject you, it is a terrible verdict on your entire being.'' Salomé was more than a spoiled, neurotic 19th-century bimbo, and Cate should have quoted from the analysis of Nietzsche she published in 1894. After all, he'd revealed his soul to her! Here is one of her insights: ''All his thinking had a forceful impact upon his inner life, so that the fullness of the inward and contending experiences threatened to burst the circumscribed boundaries of his personality.'' This sentence hauntingly yet compassionately encompasses not only Nietzsche's inadequacy as a lover but also his final madness.
This gruesome end Cate details understatedly, and his book builds up to it with equally understated anecdote. Heidegger refers to 1887 as ''the year in which everything about him radiates an excessive brilliance and in which therefore at the same time a terrible boundlessness advances out of the distance.'' Cate's account is more muted. Between the lines I sense a sincere sadness and discomfort about what became of Nietzsche, whom the author so clearly reveres.
When he turns his attention to Elisabeth, once again Cate is taciturn, perhaps out of embarrassment. Most of the time she's not much more than ''his efficient sister Elisabeth,'' who rents apartments for him, reads to him, etc. What did her brother really feel for her? Was she essentially a convenience who at times became an annoyance? And how should we judge her? (A very un-Nietzschean question!) If we could better understand her, we might better be able to consider the related matter of Nietzsche's posthumous Nazi career.
The short version is this: As her brother turned ever more militantly against conventional pieties, then vainly dabbled with Lou Salomé, Elisabeth felt abandoned. Cate quotes this letter: ''I must now try to build a new kind of life-happiness, but oh, it is so difficult.'' A year later his shocking philosophy had begun to achieve a tincture of material and social success, at which point she called him ''a conqueror, mighty, magnificent!!'' Meanwhile, she built life-happiness with a more unequivocal anti-Semite, her husband, Bernhard Forster; became widowed; acquired financial obligations and met them while coincidentally becoming the keeper of her brother's flame.
Cate's empathy and sympathy for his subject make this a first-rate biography. But just as one can allow oneself to be spellbound by the plea of a defense lawyer without necessarily dismissing the prosecution's case, so one can admire Cate's loyalty to Nietzsche while declining to accompany the two of them into the elitist heights. Cate, who has written biographies not only of André Malraux and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry -- both brave in war, one passionately egotistical and the other fraternally moral -- but also, rather surprisingly, of George Sand, reveals his own biases honestly in the preface: ''It is easy to reproach Nietzsche for having . . . contributed to the deluge by weakening the floodgates of traditional morality. But the troubling question remains: what will happen to the Western world if the present drift cannot be halted, and to what sordid depths of pornographically publicized vulgarity will our shamelessly 'transparent' culture, or what remains of it, continue to descend?'' Pornographic vulgarian that I am, I feel skeptical that the level of culture was a great deal higher for most people in Nietzsche's time. There was better education to be found then, to be sure, but also more conventionality, more idols. Cate would halt Zarathustra's descent from the mountaintop; he has closed his ears to Nietzsche's announcement that God is dead, and long dead.
This brings us to the question that must be asked about Nietzsche in our post-Holocaust epoch. Cate admits that some of the philosopher's bellicose aphorisms had a ''fateful . . . impact . . . on future generations of 'disciples,' particularly in Germany.'' In World War I, 150,000 copies of ''Thus Spake Zarathustra'' were printed up for the Kaiser's army. The Nazis, for their part, distributed it to the Hitler Youth and laid a deluxe copy in the Tannenberg Memorial.
Was Nietzsche an anti-Semite? That depends on how one rotates the barrel of the kaleidoscope. Nietzsche was plentiful in his praises of individual Jews, as Cate eagerly proves. But the editor of the letters, who of course is Elisabeth, cannot deny that ''attacks upon the Jews are often to be found in his letters to Wagner which expressed Wagner's views on the subject rather than his own.'' What could her brother's motive have been? ''Hyper-courtesy,'' Elisabeth replies.
It simply can't be wished away that a philosophy among whose central tenets is that it not be applicable to most of us (''Where the people eats and drinks, even where it reveres, it usually stinks. . . . Indeed, a moral system valid for all is basically immoral''), a philosophy that smashes all existing idols and erects its own idol -- namely, a ''realism'' which asserts that cruelty, being innate, can be construed as moral -- becomes convenient to cruel elitists.
Our semi-invalid of an ex-professor in his blue-lensed spectacles was obviously a great man, a constructive nihilist. His bravery in this regard is a precursor to Freud's: sad and disgusting aspects of our humanness might as well be faced. As for tearing down idols, received wisdom does sour into unwisdom, so why not have a revolution every now and then? In 1874 Nietzsche imagined a Mephistophelean figure whose ''negation and destruction'' is actually ''an outpouring of that powerful longing for deliverance and salvation.'' He cannot be blamed for the literalized incarnation of that figure in Hitler, about whom he might (I hope) have written at least what he wrote about Wagner: ''That which intoxicates, the sensually ecstatic, the sudden surprise, the urge to be profoundly stirred at any price -- dreadful tendencies!'' Alas, Nietzsche exhibited some of those same tendencies -- for instance, the intoxication of deliberate irrationality. It was his posthumous misfortune, and perhaps his shame, to be appropriated by ruthless politicians in the service of literally murderous conformity.
William T. Vollmann's most recent book is ''Europe Central,'' a novel.