Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  Indeed, during Nietzsche’s lifetime, the bitter abandonment by the best of the bourgeois—their artists—of the very class that had brought them into being, and the subsequent flight of these artists from politics, morality, and religion (as conventionally understood) into the exclusivity of their crafts, was considerable, if not complete. If Nietzsche is the philosophical organ of modernism, then that organ functions in a body that grew up like a town around it. Finally (an element, I think, that Nehamas does not sufficiently stress), Nietzsche’s quince-eyed look at the history of ideas resulted in the denial to philosophical explanations of the reality they claimed to describe, and returned them to the language they were made of. Upon that return they became fictions. In a sense, The Birth of Tragedy is the birth of Nietzsche too, because it contains his major metaphysical discovery: that of an existential disjunction within the material continuities of nature. It also displays the liberated skepticism of his mind and the traditional character of his emotions. Many of his present admirers hold Nietzsche’s philosophical biology against him, yet without it, and his dreams about the Greeks, you do not have Nietzsche.

  It is with rueful longing, sometimes, that the naturalist in us undertakes to describe the life our longing calls “the idyll of the animal.” We ponder the spider as it spins, and end in admiration for its patience, its persistence, the instinctive geometries of its web, even its ruthless indifference—a callousness it cannot be blamed for; or we track the lion to and from its lair, or watch the tiger in the tense alertness of its stalk; and we envy how organized the insects and animals are, how—to us—they seem always to express the essential; they know nothing, we think, of distraction, guilt, excess, anxiety, delusion, pride, shame (Nietzsche’s example is a herd of grazing cows, unmolested by memory or foreboding, the present passing from one ruminating stomach to another as if life, when processed, delivered only milk); and how fortunate these creatures are, we imagine in such moments, because each of them possesses the superior efficiencies of its species; they fit without their measure being taken; whereas we perceive a painful inexactitude in our forms and functions; the fit is the tantrum we throw when we fail to find our station; and so we say we have great gifts instead, really contriving an excuse, since we have these gifts because we need them, because basically we are a handful of opposed thumbs: we don’t know how to live.

  Our knowledge, as philosophers tell us, may be our glory, but our curse is a weakling’s dependence on it, and a suspicion of it, as if, instead of the wheel, we had invented the crutch. Or, rather, it is as if the crutch had invented us.

  We have a hunch that our liver is as full of silent life as a mollusk, that our heart and lungs close and open automatically the way an eye blinks; we are also aware that hunger is as recurrent as history, that the sexual urge comes round again like the wheel of a fast car; so that the instinctive creature is there somewhere inside us where we both love and fear it (we can only hang on to life, Nietzsche said, like someone clinging to the back of a tiger); but unlike the bedbug, which can bite with its first breath, we require a babyhood to bellow and whine and wheedle our way through, during which time we are handed by society the habits we hadn’t the wit to bring with us into the world, and repeatedly told by the same unimpeachable source that such and such traits, this or that ambition (constituting the character of an emperor or housewife, for instance, the ideals of an officer or priest), are as inborn as our bosoms or the shapes of our noses (God-given, not man-made); that the manners we shall be asked to adopt will be as natural as dueling or monogamy; that our pilgrimage to Mecca is as required as the one that sends birds flying south; or that our kowtows are as tied to our species as the fawning of the spaniel: bits of behavior which may be initially hidden, but which only need, like a deb, to be brought out.

  So the sundering we sense between nature and culture lies not like a canyon outside us, but splits our being at its most intimate depths the way mind breaks off from body. It is still another version of that bitter bifurcation long ago decreed—our expulsion from Eden—although it differs from the apparently similar Cartesian crease across things in the fact that the two halves of us once were one; that we did not always stand askance like molasses and madness, logically at odds, but grew apart over the years like husbands and wives draw themselves into distant corners of contemplation. “Even the observant animals are aware,” Rilke wrote, “that we’re not very happily at home, here, in this our interpreted world.”

  Dionysus, the god of the grape, stands for a kind of metaphysical conviviality. Under his influence, we lose our sense of separateness, because our consciousness and its objects merge. Experience is no longer a movie. We become lost in life, moving as the sea moves. Guilt gone, shame gone, we are free to do—and be—without reproach, as animals are. Knowledge, for the Dionysian, is based upon the principle that only like knows like (that you have to be one to know one), and it hires out none of the tasks of life, but performs each of them as someone rounded to the world would: jack of all trades, jill of every skill.

  Apollo, on the other hand, floats on top of the flux, casts concepts over chaos like nets—such nets as magically create their own fish. Like many modern artists who felt that their consciousness had become corrupted by certain of society’s “civilizing” lies, and who wanted, consequently, to resee the world, philosophers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson attacked the tendency of the mind to divide the continuous into discrete parts, to capture change in classificatory pens like cattle in a stockyard, and to replace experience with the ideas that described it, responding to notions, not to things—or, rather, fabricating things right and left: first filling the mind with thoughts, and then the world with their objects, like the most industrious middle-class manufacturer, miraculously making ice cubes out of what might really be steam.

  Only an Apollonian could have invented Dionysus, because the Dionysian is too deep in the wallow ever to wonder.

  In his personal life, this division represents Nietzsche’s natural longing for an active role, his unconsummated desire for community, his loathing of the lonely sick man’s obsessive introspection. It hardens the commonplace and almost innocent observation that “everyone has his own point of view” into an inescapably vicious parochialism, as if the pie, once cut, could never be imagined to be whole. At the level of rhetoric, the Apollonian disposes schemes and tropes like a general, while the Dionysian regards every format as concealing unscrupulous interests and threatens to expose and defy them all, so that to be carried away into absurdity is almost an obligation. At the level of concept, the Apollonian will distinguish even in a fog the low-lying from the highly piled, pea soup from gruel, whereas the Dionysian will treat every cut as a wound which needs immediate suturing. As far as art is concerned, the modernist’s tendency toward parody and self-reference, for instance, is Apollonian, while its revolutionary extremism and love of excess is Dionysian. Any attack on things (such as nonobjective painting is perceived to be) will meet with the grape god’s approval, not because objects as such are deplorable, but because the very fact of their definition is. Finally, at the level of ordinary life, and biologically speaking, the duality describes a consciousness fatally turned against itself and continuously engaged in civil war.

  Man makes himself, covering the creature within (if “within” is the right word) with culture’s various costumes. He surrounds himself with himself, so that even the wilderness is soon a plant in his park-sized gardens, a specimen that requires tending to stay wild. By minding his manners, man reaches the level of the all too human, only to become, as he does in some cases, a Western European or a Mandarin, and finally squeezing himself—fat foot for a thin shoe—into some petite subspecies like the French.

  Nietzsche’s complaint about civilization is not Freud’s, or, again, Rousseau’s. It has another emphasis. Pent-up instinct does not threaten the peaceful orders of society like a boiler about to burst from the pressures of its libidinous steam, for there is little p
eaceful, and nothing rational, in these designs, only expressions of hypocritical dominance, coerced subservience, unmerited glorification, and a systematic corruption of consciousness. Civilization is not worth repairing. On the other hand, recovering the savage’s natural nobility is impossible. The phrase “noble savage” is an oxymoron. Nobility is a concept of culture. The question is whether man might not advance himself beyond his present miserable condition of interior and exterior tyranny into one less founded on lies, one less illusory, more satisfying and fulfilling. There is no Aristotelian seed, no primal potency, no indwelling great-souled aristocrat in infant form like baby Hercules, struggling to emerge in him; but perhaps an implantation might be tried.

  Nietzsche’s thinking sometimes appears utopian; however, its only U is the aforementioned U-turn it delights in taking. One cannot expect societies to improve themselves. They are fatally caught in their own coils. Only the individual who frees himself from each and every one of them, who stands apart, as though—in Nietzsche’s imagery—on the peak of a mountain, has the opportunity to become exemplary. Nor is the exemplary man a representative man in Emerson’s usage. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini stand for Man more appropriately than Goethe or da Vinci. Unlike Moses, when Zarathustra descends from his heights, he brings no tablets of the Law, but only his shining self. In this sense, Nietzsche’s attitude is anti-political, un-ideal, and anarchistic to a degree that calls Kant to mind: it recommends the rule of oneself by oneself, of the alone by the alone.

  What does a person have to believe, then, to believe in this essentially beliefless and desystematized system? One must believe that around the world, and throughout time, a very large number of comprehensive outlooks (including their corresponding cultural practices, of course) have been held—honored, loved, obeyed—by collections of people from less to large. One has to regard many—if not all—of these cultures as opposing one another in practice and contradicting one another in principle, either entirely or at some significant point. One would have to conclude, consequently, that only a few such practices could be correct, only a few such principles true, while most—if not all, again—must be wrong or false. Although a logical law is being invoked here, and no philosophical names are being taken, it remains the case that nearly every value system and significant outlook on reality is not only threatened with falsehood, as it were abstractly, but is false on its face—is risibly absurd, painfully silly, woefully confused, criminally corrupting, ruthlessly exploitive.

  Nevertheless, these numerous hilarities (and they need only be held up to view, as Bouvard and Pécuchet do in Flaubert’s magnificent annihilation, to provoke the profoundest and saddest laughter) have not prevented great civilizations from espousing them; from, in fact, being shaped and helped to their heights by them, whether Greek or Persian, Hebrew or Roman, Aztec or Mayan, Chinese or Yankee. In short, reality, whatever it is beyond our representations, does not compel anyone to a particular form of existence, or a particular set of values, the way it forces ants into hills, bees into hives, or baboons into their colonies. There is certainly no natural morality, in that sense, no true way of life.

  It does not follow from this relativist premise that all modes of existence are equally okay. Some are a whole lot better than others, but that judgment cannot rest on any factual foundation, but on concepts like “freedom,” “fairness,” “form,” and “fulfillment.”

  The Greek sophists had already seen that if virtue alters, like the weather does, from Athens to Sparta, then the truly fortunate are those who control the currents and can make it rain in the mountains and snow on the plains as they prefer. Nor are constitutions, traditions, and legislative assemblies the only forces, or priests and politicians the sole controllers. Weak of body and of intermittent mind, Nietzsche is nursed first by his sister and then by his mother, each of whom enjoys the pleasures of such powers, and has her plans. Finally, Nietzsche will be buried beneath the misreadings of his texts, and his message made to mean whatever sister or the sophists say it means, because Nietzsche has a biography which grows longer even in the grave. And he knew that at least the vehemence of his opinions would lie there beside him, just as the syphilis-induced madness of his mind was symbolically suited to dismay his final days.

  At one time, in Western Europe, when Church and State were still important rivals, the cultural life of the people (its aspirations, moral norms, even the functions of its arts) were in the keeping of the Church, and remained in the realm of the sacred. The State progressively secularized or politicized the cultural arena, and Nietzsche foresaw the terrible dangers inherent in this development and opposed it. But he stood on the side of the Church without a church to stand beside. In the United States (that forerunner of every future) the separation of the two powers (desirable as the divorce is) has permitted commercial interests to take over culture and determine values, successfully invading and subverting both politics and religion. That conquest is what capitalism has come to signify. Politics and religion (as well as art) are now simply business by other means.

  Having rejected Christian dogma and seen the Church’s dominance pass to an even more resolutely vulgar and military-minded nation-state; feeling helpless, certainly, before the dismaying cultural forces then at work; Nietzsche lets his shadow fall upon the only world where he is strong. He ultimately adopts a Stoic posture, despite his denunciation of similar strategies of “self-discipline,” concealing his inwardly aimed adjustments to society beneath a helmet of hyperbole and metaphorically aggressive shield-slapping. The esthetic impulse emerges most genuinely from the medium of its expertise, so that when Nietzsche works out upon himself, the self he shapes is cast first, like a shade, upon a sheet. It is a beguiling form, but one his fingers fashion.

  In an exceedingly interesting, and often touching, collection of memories about Nietzsche called Conversations with Nietzsche, edited by Sander Gilman, Ida Overbeck, the wife of one of his oldest friends, writes:

  I always believed that Nietzsche, despite all opposition to Christianity, was not an enemy of religion, however aloof from it he stood, and that he was himself even capable of producing religious effects. The superman as a substitute for God and the doctrine of return as substitute for immortality, however, seemed not to be very tenable idealistic fantasies.

  Just as activities that seem quite different from one another (such as adding a bar bill or rolling the dice to see who will pay it) can turn out, on inspection, to have the same form (as do climbing a ladder, of course, and advancing through the company, or polishing the silver and going to confession), so may convictions that appear quite opposite and antagonistic result in indistinguishable attitudes. Predestination (the faith of his father) and chance (the floozie he courted) have an affinity for each other, as does the view (he also went with) that reality is made up of the meaningless movements of matter, caroms that occasionally throw off an inconsequential spray of sparks we call consciousness; because each renders agents impotent before affairs, so that we are, in effect, riding on the back of a tiger, a cork bobbing upon an indifferent swell, or a character captured in an already written book. The importance of these doctrines, as far as the individual is concerned, is that they protect, enhance, and justify an attitude; they express a philosophical disposition; they don’t merely, in some circumstances, seem reasonable or appropriate, or momentarily work in one’s favor, although they may certainly possess such advantages; rather, they reflect an indigenous state of character and mind: of melancholia, impulsiveness, helplessness, paranoia, megalomania, anality, and so on. For the masters in any society, profit and power are an ideal’s principal payoff, whereas its value for the individual often rests in the comfort, consolation, and security it provides. Honesty in a philosopher means that he will deceive himself first. Despite their professed allegiance to rigor and clarity, philosophers have joyfully danced to jargon’s tunes and religiously carried out the rituals of obfuscation. The truth holds nobody back.

  The superma
n is not a replacement for God. The superman is one of the elect. Eternal recurrence is thought to justify the fall of the littlest sparrow; and every evil in the world, insofar as it is a part of a work of art, only adds to the interest of the drama, like the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands. In addition to the many sympathies between Nietzsche’s ideas and his father’s pastoral ones, there are formal affinities too—between the rhetoric of the prophet Zarathustra, for instance, and that of the prophets Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. In Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Kathleen Marie Higgins has placed Nietzsche’s work very firmly within a context of traditional dogma. In the Christian drama of redemption, for instance, the future is past before it reaches the present. This is no less true in Nietzsche.