Just Doubt It

Nietzsche at about 30

Nietzsche, as is perhaps inevitable for anyone attempting a radical critique of modernity, particularly someone who slays sacred cows so wantonly, is controversial and aimed to be.  A lonely man, he craved attention, and wanted to show off his talent, his daring, his outrageousness.  Startlingly original, he shared few of the common prejudices of his time.  His willingness to shatter taboos (“philosophizing with a hammer” as he called it) is a big part of his fascination.  His thought, like that of Socrates, whom he both admired and criticized, could be seen as a training in doubt, and he hoped to be remembered even longer than this mentor.  He so clearly yearned to transcend his time and place that I feel embarrassed for him whenever he shows himself too much a product of it (so German, so 19^th century). 

He was an amateur who made no more off his writing than Van Gogh did off his painting. Now, I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the work of professional writers now and then, but their motives are mixed, after all, their integrity is compromised.  To put it crudely, they’re whores.  Not to say you can’t have a wild and wonderful night with them on occasion, but it’s the amateurs, the ones who do it for love, that I return to again and again.  Nietzsche considered the corruption of culture by money to be far more pernicious than the like corruption of politics, because culture is more important than politics.  

After his breakdown

There’s a great deal of provocative material in Nietzsche’s oeuvre, he challenges your presuppositions, makes you think.  But the core of his interest is the Death of God, his melodramatic, even hysterical, metaphor for the spiritual impact of the Scientific Revolution on Western civilization, our migration from a metaphysical to an empirical worldview.  He believes this to be such a momentous event (“the great noon”) that it will inevitably result in the breakdown of society into chaos and anarchy, because the destruction of the foundation of all our values must inevitably lead to nihilism.  There’s no way to avoid this, according to him, because it’s an event that’s already occurred, even though many may not yet realize it.  He seems to fear that the knowledge of this event, our murder of God, will suddenly break over humanity like a massive wave and sweep everything before it.  It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that it could, instead, gradually percolate into human consciousness over a long period of time, and that those who recognize it do so because they are ready.  Some may succumb to nihilism, but their numbers may never be large enough to swamp society.  Others, lacking the acute metaphysical need he felt, may accommodate the news without such an extreme reaction.  After all, in terms of metaphysical beliefs, non-believers are already the third largest group, globally, after Christians and Muslims.  There are more secular humanists than Buddhists, Jews, and a number of other religious persuasions thrown together and, given the number of human societies that, over the millennia, have managed to survive without the Christian God (including some nominally Christian ones), the idea that we can’t seems, well, a bit parochial.  In fact, human societies have always determined their own values, invented them ex nihilo.   It was just a common delusion that a god had done it.  And anyway, few ponder the philosophical underpinnings of their lives with the same obsessive rigor and seriousness that Nietzsche did, most just believe whatever some authority tells them, so it’s a little difficult to credit his hysteria about this.   

Science derives from the Greeks.  Not just the line of Democritus and Epicurus, but also from Socrates: the Socratic Method is the forerunner of the Scientific Method.  While admiring the ascetic devotion of science to truth, Nietzsche, a classical philologist by training, criticizes its innate optimism, which is based on faith in the explicability of nature and belief in knowledge as a panacea, and these it derived, ultimately, from Socrates.  The innate optimism of science, Nietzsche believed, results in a delusion of limitless power.  In his own philosophical practice he eschews scientific method, preferring the poetic approach of aphorism.  (He refers to himself as a “Dionysian Pessimist.”)  Given his ambivalence toward science and his view that it has led to a crisis in human affairs, you might imagine he would have some sympathy with beleaguered Christianity, the main victim of science’s corrosive, anti-metaphysical effects, but in fact he attacks it mercilessly, holding it to be bankrupt and, in any case, dishonest and nihilistic in nuce.  (He is a champion of honesty, the “youngest virtue.”)

In the end Nietzsche’s perspective is, overall, too strident, stringent, stern, too strenuous and strepitous for my taste; and too male-adolescent: he wants to attack and destroy everything, and takes a little too much glee in wreaking havoc.  The various eras of our lives foster different perspectives, each with its own set of assets and liabilities, and each of these outlooks has an equal right to exist.  Nietzsche’s is a youthful perspective, rash and impulsive, full of itself.  I enjoyed it more when I was younger.  Like Mishima, his youth partisanship painted him into a corner from which he could not easily exit into middle-age.  His over-valuation of youth would have caused him, as it did Mishima, unbearable self-contempt at its loss.  So, like Mishima, he had to die (at least mentally) at 44, in the last glow of life’s summer. 

Nietzsche created a mythos that elevated him to super-shaman and psychopomp of this transition and tried to impress it on the world.  That was his ultimate will to power.  He claimed to be writing the history of the next 2 centuries, but 125 years since he penned his last jottings and lapsed into mental torpor, the calamity he prophesized has yet to arrive, so the jury is still out on him.  If he turns out to be right and the Death of God does bring on a massive crisis in human affairs, a major nervous breakdown, then he will be seen as a towering figure, the greatest Old-Testament-style prophet since Isaiah.  If, on the other hand, humanity manages to swallow the Death of God with little more than some mild indigestion, he will be seen more as an hysterical kook, a megalomaniacal Chicken Little with some crazy ideas, who, nevertheless, wrote some interesting commentary and philosophical poetry, embraced his inner lunacy, and will likely retain a modest measure of immortality as a master of the bon mot, the pithy epigram, and an inspiration and road map for readers longing to become who they are.