We're all of us going to fuckin' die, and it's not going to mean a goddamned thing. Nothing that we've done or thought or felt means jack shit. That's Nietzsche in a nutshell. All the rest of it--overman, will to power, eternal recurrence, last man, slave morality, resentiment--is just whistling in the dark.
I mean, the starting point is "God is Dead." That makes Nietzsche the direct heir of Spinoza. And Darwin. This line of thought begins, at least since the Renaissance, with Descartes, who resolves to doubt everything until he can find something that is certain. What he comes up with is the fact that he's aware that he's aware. That's the cogito. From that point he goes on to posit the existence of a soul and of God as distinct from the material universe of things and bodies. But in steps Spinoza who says, Hold on; wait a minute; if there is an ultimate substance to the universe, then it cannot be two. Therefore, everything there is--Life, the Universe, and Everything--can only be one Substance=Nature=God. There is no split between the physical and spiritual, nor between body and soul, nor between God and the Universe. And God is no personal deity to ask favors from or to seek sanctions for the way we live and see the world.
Nietzsche certainly wasn't the first thinker who recognized that Spinoza's God was cold comfort at best. Leibniz was both enthralled and horrified at this prospect, and Kant, Hume, Hobbes, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard sought to refute or challenge the implications of Spinoza's thought. But Nietzsche said, "Bring it on!" and resolved to question everything until he reached the most fundamental implications of those ideas. He ends up with "God is Dead" and the spectre of nihilism haunting the west. As Ivan K. says, if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. And if that's the case, why not just commit suicide and be done with it? Why keep on keepin' on?
Nietzsche saw the something similar happening with the Greeks after the Ionian Enlightenment, and he wondered how they could look at the suffering, calamity, and absurdity inherent in life and still maintain an affirmative attitude, a joyous celebration, even, toward living--"a yet unbroken reply to the vicissitudes of fortune, a triumphant response to suffering, and a celebration of life as, at bottom...indestructible, powerful, and joyous.'" (Is Fred idealizing the Greeks here? I remember the Sophocles who says "Nothing surpasses not being born/but if born, to return where we came from/is next best, the sooner the better.") The Greeks "looked with bold eyes into the dreadful destructive turmoil of so-called world-history as well as into the cruelty of nature" and "without yielding to resignation...reaffirmed life with works of art." What was it that allowed them to do this?
Nietzsche's inquiries lead him, eventually, to three concepts: will to power, the overman, and eternal recurrence. It's kinda bizarre that he would put forth such sweeping and dubious sounding concepts after resolving to question everything. Those ideas have certainly been put to questionable uses, including some of the intellectual underpinings of the Nazi state. But Kaufmann sets out to clear Nietzsche's name from some of these associations and to show how Nietzsche had been misunderstood by just about everyone in the 80 years between Nietzsche's books and the first printing of this book in 1949.
First off, any meaning that can be found for life, the universe and everything cannot apply to everybody but only the best and the brightest. Man is just another animal, just another primate, and therefore, "the mass of mankind lacks any essential dignity or worth." So "the goal of humanity cannot lie in its end but only in its highest specimens." The rest of us are shit out of luck. Some men--very, very few--look squarely at the apparent absurdity of life, the universe, and everything and then seek to overcome their own natures and give meaning and order to existence. This is the meaning of the will to power, the perpetual need to surpass ourselves. Those who can do it honestly without need for external forces or validation, then, are the overmen, primarily artists, philosophers, and saints. The essence of this self transcendence is the sublimation of their impulses into one focus, an artistic unity of self: "One thing is needful--giving style to one's character…in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason." "He has overcome his animal nature, organized the chaos of his passions, sublimated his impulses, and given style to his character." "The man who perfects himself and transfigures his physis [nature] achieves ultimate happiness and experiences such an overwhelming joy that he no longer feels concerned about the 'justification' of the world: he affirms it forward, backward and 'in all eternity.'" That's eternal recurrence: the man who in saying Yes! to his own being also affirms the world just as it is for all times.
So Nietzsche spoke to me big time 30 years ago. "Independence of soul! That's at stake here. No sacrifice can be too great." "The spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism." "Man can live and die in a grand style, working out his own salvation instead of relying on the sacrifice of another." I thought I was hot shit then and this heroic image grabbed me. I could thumb my nose at the universe and get along on my own, maintaining an intellectual superiority to anyone else who couldn't.
Only, I don't feel that way so much anymore. Maybe I wasn't nearly as hot shit as I thought I was. Certainly, I wasn't nearly as strong as I supposed myself to be. But, also, maybe Nietzsche didn't get it all right, either. Hard to say. But I do feel that he doesn't get it that we're all in this together. If only the "highest specimens" are able to find meaning in self overcoming, the rest of us are kinda stuck with just muddling along the best we can, trying to make sense of it all. If we say that the mass of humanity lead meaningless lives, we've just denied importance to ourselves and our fellow travelers and sufferers. When I think about what has given my life the most meaning--my love of Sara and my family, my friendships with Jim and George and Frank, my attachments to my students and athletes, it's only inadvertently about self-overcoming and more about connections. Isn't that what evolutionary psychology is telling us these days, that we are hard-wired to be deeply connected to each other?
Likewise, I'm finding the "vivesectionist" of contemporary values to be a bit of a bore. Maybe it is needful to look down on others at some point--Kaufmann says in another book that consciousness really begins on the other side of alienation--but at 62, I don't so much feel the need for that any more. When we define ourselves by what we are not, then it's really just another limitation on ourselves. Likewise, why just the artist, philosopher and saint? Why not the athlete, the teacher, the graphic designer, the computer programmer, the shoe store salesman? If we do something well, and we love it, and we seek to continually surpass ourselves at it, why shouldn't that path be open to finding meaning and transcendence in our lives? Can't we get there by chopping wood and carrying water?
So maybe Nietzsche has lost a lot of his appeal to me because I've grown old and tired and lazy and mediocre over the years. And, of course, there's the hard realization that I'm not one of the highest specimens. So be it.
I'm a little more disturbed that Kaufmann doesn't speak as deeply to me now as when I read him 20, 30, even 40 years ago. I would have put "Critique of Religion and Philosophy", "The Faith of a Heretic", and this book among the five or six most important books in my intellectual development. I've reread them all three or four times, and somehow now they don't seem as deep, as important, as they once were. I re-read "Critique" a few years back, and I didn't feel that the arguments held up as well as I previously thought. And I've kinda had the same feelings about this book. Kaufmann continually points out how Nietzsche has been misunderstood over the years, but he doesn't do quite as thorough a job of explaining Nietzsche's thought as he advertises. There were a lot of digressions in his presentation, and the book just doesn't seem as well organized as it has in the past. When I read it before, I thought that I had the final word on modern thought. Now, it just doesn't seem as convincing. That leaves me pretty bummed, really, for I feel like I've lost an old and important teacher.
Author: Kaufmann, Walter
Date Published: 1949
Length: 532 pp
electronic print
