by Colin Wilson
The poet finds that he can answer this question with a ‘yes’. His position is understandable. He begins with Reason, which, as it were, makes him self-sufficient (as it made the Victorians) and he subjects all to the test of reason. Ultimately, his reason informs him: you are not self-sufficient; you are futile, floating in a void. This is unanswerable. What is he to do? Demolish his own premises? ‘Since I am futile, my reason must be futile too, in which case, its conclusions are lies anyway.’ That is too much. He must commit himself to the idea: There may be something which is not futile, but it is completely beyond me, incomprehensible to me. And what if there isn’t anything ‘beyond’ ... no, he cannot say ‘I believe5. Hence the question:
Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender?
With these lines, Eliot was over his stile, out of the Outsider’s position. It was not a long step to realizing that this experience of terror on the edge of nothingness was not an unfamiliar experience to many of the saints, Christian and otherwise, and that therefore religion need not be synonymous with a belief in fairy-stories. Admittedly, this is still a long way from actually joining a Church, for it is one thing to admit that some of the Church’s doctrines are intellectually tenable; quite another to offer full assent to the tremendous compromises which the Church is forced to accept in order to make a religion in which millions of Insiders will be comfortable, as well as the occasional Outsider.
In going on to speak of Eliot’s development in ‘Ash Wednesday’, I have made a point which is not especially relevant in this chapter; I have done this for the convenience of not having to split up the story of Eliot’s development. Still, readers who feel dubious about the connexion of the last two paragraphs with what has gone before can dismiss them as unproved; we shall have to return to the subject later from a completely different angle, and for the moment it is not important.
For the moment, we are concerned with the question, Ultimate Yes or Ultimate No, and compelled to admit that most of our analyses so far point to the answer, Ultimate No. Vaslav Nijinsky would object that this is because we treat Reason as if it were capable of affording a key all on its own. Well, that is the philosopher’s business. But a philosopher who did not do so... he would be not quite ‘a philosopher’, perhaps ? Would such a person be able to offer any helpful suggestions about the Outsider ? This is the question we are to keep in mind while examining the contribution of Friedrich Nietzsche.
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Nietzsche was born at Roecken in Saxony in 1844. His father, like Van Gogh’s, was a Protestant clergyman. Recently published documents show that Nietzsche was intensely religious as a child, and that during his adolescence he considered entering a monastery.11 We shall attempt to show that the impulses that drove to his life’s work—his devaluation of all values—were at bottom, religious impulses. The later attack on Christendom, for instance, sprang from a feeling that Christendom was not religious enough. But unlike Kierkegaard, who attacked Christendom for the same reasons, Nietzsche did not support the idea of Christianity. His dislike of it went to the length of proclaiming its errors to be fundamental, worthy to be pitched-out lock, stock and barrel. Yet all his life Nietzsche preached his ideas with the fervour of a prophet, and a prophet cannot be an irreligious man. He asserted that Christians generally are intellectually dishonest and morally lazy, and that these grave deficiencies are partly accountable to what the Christian believes. Nietzsche had an alternative system of belief, which we must examine in due course. What is important is the fact that he began as a fervent Christian. In a letter written when he was twenty-one and militantly atheistic, he tells his friend Von Gersdorff:
‘If Christianity means belief in a historical person or event, I have nothing to do with it. But if it means the need for salvation, then I can treasure it.’
And this is the reason why Nietzsche must be recognized as a religious man; above everything else, he was aware of the need for what he called ‘salvation’. We may disagree with him; we may even agree with a Jesuit theologian that his heresies were ‘poisonous and detestable’, but we cannot doubt the sincerity of his need for ‘salvation’.
Nietzsche was a romantic; he belongs to the same tradition as Schiller, Novalis, Hoffmann. As a boy and adolescent he read a great deal, took lonely walks, wrote poetry, thought about himself and his possible destiny; at thirteen he wrote an introspective autobiography; a year later he records his intention of dedicating his life to the service of God. Among his friends he was nicknamed ‘the little pastor’. But his conception of religion was always elastic; a tradition tells how he and his sister once built a makeshift altar on the site of an old pagan sacrificial altar in a churchyard, and then paced gravely around it, intoning ‘Odin hear us’ into the rising smoke.
At fourteen Nietzsche was sent to the famous Landschule at Pforta; this was the school that had produced Novalis, Fichte, the Schlegels. There, without his sister to share his thoughts, Nietzsche dramatized himself as the romantic hero. A later aphorism asserts: ‘All great men are play actors of their own ideal.5 Nietzsche’s ideal was compounded from Byron’s Manfred, Schiller’s Robbers and Noyalis’s Heinrich. He learned from Novalis that every man is potentially hero and genius; that only inertia keeps men mediocre. The lesson sank deep; when he read Emerson’s essays at sixteen he was elated to find Novalis and his own intuitions confirmed in the pronouncements on ‘Self-reliance’ and The OversouP. From Emerson he absorbed an element of Stoicism that never left him till the end. Once, listening to a conversation among schoolboys about Mucius Scaevola, Nietzsche set a heap of lighted matches on fire on the palm of his hand to demonstrate that it could be done. New influences on his mind were undermining his Lutheran training. He bought the piano score of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and learnt it by heart. He helped to found a society of intellectuals called ‘Germania’, and wrote essays for its magazine. The essay on Tate and History’ that he published in Germania stated: ‘Vast upheavals will happen in the future, as soon as men realize that the structure of Christianity is only based on assumptions.... I have tried to deny everything....’
Certainly his innate religiousness became at this period (to quote his Gaya Scienza) ‘a will to truth at all costs, a youthful madness in the love of truth’. And what is equally certain from his own utterances is that he found himself close to the edge of William James’s condition of moral horror, complete negation, like looking into an abyss. James quotes an example which is worth requoting for the insight it gives us into Nietzsche’s mind at this time; it concerns the French philosopher Jouffroy, and it illustrates the way in which the questioning mind can systematically weed out all affections and beliefs that seem groundless, until it is left in a vacuum that terrifies the human soul. Jouffroy writes:12
I shall never forget that night of September in which the veil that concealed from me my own incredulity was torn. I hear again my steps in the narrow, naked chamber where, long after the hour of sleep had come, I had the habit of walking up and downAnxiously I followed my thoughts as they descended from layer to layer towards the foundation of my consciousness, scattering one by one all the illusions that until then had screened its windings from my view, making them at every moment more clearly visible.
Vainly I clung to these last beliefs as a shipwrecked sailor clings to the fragments of his vessel, vainly, frightened at the unknown void into which I was about to float. I turned with them towards my childhood, my family, my country, all that was dear and sacred to me; the inflexible current of my thought was too strong—parents, family, memory, beliefs—it forced me to let go of everything. The investigation went on more obstinate and more severe as it drew near its term, and it did not stop until the end was reached. I knew then that in the depth of my mind, nothing was left that stood erect. This moment was a frightful one, and when towards morning, I threw myself exhausted on my bed, I seemed to feel my earlier
life, so smiling and so full, go out like a fire, and before me another life opened, sombre and unpeopled, where in future I must live alone, alone with my fatal thought that had exiled me there, and which I was tempted to curse. The days that followed this were the saddest days of my life.
Such an experience is not strange to thinkers; James quotes John Stuart Mill’s case, which has much in common with this, and in the next chapter we shall examine early experiences of Tolstoy that resemble it closely. Nietzsche experienced it. More than one of his books tell us about it obliquely; we shall also touch on those in due course. Particularly there is a passage in The Joyful Wisdom that speaks of ‘pn.in... that compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and divest ourselves of all trust and all good nature wherein we have formerly installed our humanity. I doubt whether such pain improves us, but I know it deepens us.’13 Nietzsche was used to being alone. He regarded it as part of the destiny of the man of genius. His hero, Schopenhauer, convinced him of it when he was barely twenty, and although he came later to reject Schopenhauer, he never rebelled against his destiny of aloneness.
Nietzsche read Schopenhauer at Leipzig University in 1865.
It was Schopenhauer who had informed a friend, when he was still in his teens: ‘Life is a sorry affair, and I am determined to spend it in reflecting on it.’ We have an account of Nietzsche’s first reading of the ‘gloomy philosopher’ that affords us a moving glimpse of the ‘artist as a young man’:
In young people, if they have a tendency to melancholy, ill humours and annoyances of a personal kind take on a general character. At the time, I was hanging in the air with a number of painful experiences and disappointments, without help, without fundamental beliefs. In the happy seclusion of my rooms I was able to gather myself together.... One day I happened to find this book in old Rohn’s secondhand book shop... picked it up and turned over the pages. I don’t know what demon whispered to me, ‘Take this book home with you.’... At home, I threw myself into the corner of the sofa, and began to let that forceful, gloomy genius work upon me. Here, where, every line cried renunciation, denial, resignation, here I saw a mirror in which I observed the world, life and my own soul in frightful grandeur. Here there gazed at me the full, unbiased eye of Art, here I saw sickness and healing, exile and refuge, heaven and hell. The need to know oneself, even to gnaw at oneself, laid a powerful hold on me.... There remain the uneasy, melancholic pages of my diary for that time... with their desperate looking-upwards ... for the reshaping of the whole kernel of man. Even bodily penances were not lacking. For example, for 14 days on end, I forced myself to go to bed at 2 o’clock and get up at 6 o’clock. A nervous irritability overcame me... 14
We see that, as with Lawrence, intellectual awakening and physical penance go together. But more important is the change in Nietzsche’s way of regarding himself. Depressed, wretched, with a feeling of imprisonment in his brain and body, his earlier enthusiasm for Greek philosophy offered him no mirror to see his own face. Schopenhauer’s philosophy did. It confirmed what he felt about the nature of the world and his place in it. Schopenhauer gave Nietzsche that detachment from himself which is the first condition of self-knowledge.
There are two vital experiences in Nietzsche’s life that I shall refer to several times, and which I may as well quote here together (although they are separated by several years); both are characteristic of Nietzsche in the way that the candle-flame episode was characteristic of Van Gogh. The first is related in a letter of 1865 to his friend Von Gersdorff:
Yesterday an oppressive storm hung over the sky, and I hurried to a neighbouring hill called Leutch. ... At the top I found a hut, where a man was killing two kid goats while his son watched him. The storm broke with a tremendous crash, discharging thunder and hail, and I had an indescribable sense of well-being and zest.... Lightning and tempest are different worlds, free powers, without morality. Pure Will, without the confusions of intellect—how happy, how free.15
The experience seems simple enough, and yet its effect on his way of thinking was far-reaching. Normally the sight of blood would have been unpleasant to him; now, the exhilaration of the storm combined somehow with the smell of blood, the flash of the knife, the fascinated child looking on; and the result was the sudden intuition of pure Will, free of the troubles and perplexities of intellect: an intuition which was release from the ‘thought-riddled nature5 which had so far been his chief trouble.
The second episode happened some years later, during the Franco-Prussian War, when Nietzsche was serving as an orderly in the ambulance corps. He told it to his sister in later life, when she asked him once about the origin of his idea of the Will to Power.
For weeks Nietzsche had attended the sick and wounded on the battlefields until the sight of blood and gangrened limbs had swallowed up his horror into a numbness of fatigue. One evening, after a hard day’s work with the wounded, he- was entering a small town near Strasbourg, on foot and alone. He heard the sound of approaching hoof beats and stood back under the wall to allow the regiment to pass. First the cavalry rode by at top speed, and then behind them marched the foot soldiers. It was Nietzsche’s old regiment. As he stood and watched them passing, these men going to battle, perhaps to death, the conviction came again that ‘the strongest and highest will to life does not lie in the puny struggle to exist, but in the Will to war, the Will to Power....’
Both experiences must be examined carefully and without prejudice. In a sense they were ‘mystical experiences’. Normally Nietzsche was imprisoned in the ‘thought-riddled nature’. These experiences point to an exaltation of Life. In Blake’s phrase: Energy is eternal delight. Tree powers without morality’, ‘pure Will’. Such phrases are the foundation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, a memory of a mystical experience in which an unhealthy student saw a vision of complete health, free of his body’s limitations, free of the stupidity of personality and thought. This was Nietzsche’s profoundest knowledge. It is introduced into the first pages of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, written when Nietzsche was a young professor at Basle University:
... the blissful ecstasy that arises from the innermost depths of man, ay, of nature, at this same collapse of the principium individuations, and we shall gain an insight into the Dionysian, which is brought into closest ken, perhaps, by the analogy of drunkenness. It is either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which the hymns of all primitive men and peoples tell us, or by the powerful approach of Spring penetrating all nature with joy, that those Dionysian emotions awake, in which the subject vanishes to complete forgetfulness.16
Nietzsche knew this emotion; it became the acid test by which he judged everything. According to Nietzsche, Socrates never knew it; therefore (he shocked the academic world by announcing) Socrates represents the decay of Greek culture; its apex had been the earlier worship of Bacchus, the god of raw, upsurging vitality. He applied the same test to most of the philosophers and literary men of his day; none of them survived it except Schopenhauer (and the day would come when even Schopenhauer would get kicked after the rest). And so, at the age of twenty-eight, Nietzsche stood alone, except for the two men for whom he still felt respect: Schopenhauer and Wagner. Three men against the world... but what men!
Nietzsche had known Wagner personally since 1868; he had met him in Leipzig before he was appointed professor at Basle when Wagner was fifty-nine, Nietzsche twenty-four. At Basle, Nietzsche was able to follow up the acquaintance, which soon developed into a warm friendship. Wagner was living at Tribschen, on the Lake of Lucerne, working on the composition of The Ring; his companion there was Cosima von Biilow, daughter of Franz Liszt, who had deserted her husband to live with Wagner. In their unconventional household, Nietzsche felt at home at last; he and Wagner frequently sat up talking until the early hours of the morning. It was here that Wagner read Nietzsche his essay, ‘On the State and Religion’, with its doctrine that religion and patriotism are indispensable as ‘opiums of the people’; that on
ly the King stands above it all, with the courage to suffer, to reject the common delusions, sustained by art ‘that makes life appear like a game and withdraws us from the common fate’. (Only ten years later, Dostoevsky was to project the same idea into The Brothers Karamazov, substituting for the King his Grand Inquisitor.)
Nietzsche felt Wagner was a brother spirit; Wagner thought of Nietzsche as a brilliant young disciple. Both were wrong. The day would come when Nietzsche would write a pamphlet exalting Bizet above Wagner, and Wagner would write a pamphlet to prove that Nietzsche was a Jew. Those who, like myself, read Nietzsche unstintedly and listen to Wagner whenever they get the chance, may wonder why two such men had to fall out and denounce each other. The answer is that Nietzsche was a tireless poet-philosopher who never ceased to want to transcend himself, while Wagner (in 1868) was a very successful musician who was perfectly satisfied with himself as he was. The self-surmounter [Obtrganger, literally ‘over-goer’ or ‘self-surmounter’] can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself. One day Nietzsche would hear Die Meistersinger and be aware of nothing but self-satisfaction in the violins and French horns. And the prophet Wagner would feel bitter about the apostacy of his one-time disciple.