There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy … So long as we persist in this inborn error … the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence … hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of what is called
disappointment
.
They would never have grown so disappointed if only they had entered love with the correct expectations:
What disturbs and renders unhappy … the age of youth … is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises the constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness of our dreams hover before us in capriciously selected shapes and we search in vain for their original … Much would have been gained if through timely advice and instruction young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.
(Ill. 20.12)
3
We do have one advantage over moles. We may have to fight for survival and hunt for partners and have children as they do, but we can in addition go to the theatre, the opera and the concert hall, and in bed in the evenings, we can read novels, philosophy and epic poems – and it is in these activities that Schopenhauer located a supreme source of relief from the demands of the will-to-life. What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image. Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognize as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own. They explain our condition to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it. We may be obliged to continue burrowing underground, but through creative works, we can at least acquire moments of insight into our woes, which spare us feelings of alarm and isolation (even persecution) at being afflicted by them. In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
The philosopher admired his mother’s friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe because he had turned so many of the pains of love into knowledge, most famously in the novel he had published at the age of twenty-five, and which had made his name throughout Europe. The Sorrows of Young Werther described the unrequited love felt by a particular young man for a particular young woman (the charming Lotte, who shared Werther’s taste for The Vicar of Wakefield and wore white dresses with pink ribbons at the sleeves), but it simultaneously described the love affairs of thousands of its readers (Napoleon was said to have read the novel nine times). The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing of us. As Schopenhauer put it:
The … poet takes from life that which is quite particular and individual, and describes it accurately in its individuality; but in this way he reveals the whole of human existence … though he appears to be concerned with the particular, he is actually concerned with that which is everywhere and at all times. From this it arises that sentences, especially of the dramatic poets, even without being general apophthegms, find frequent application in real life.
Goethe’s readers not only recognized themselves in The Sorrows of Young Werther, they also understood themselves better as a result, for Goethe had clarified a range of the awkward, evanescent moments of love, moments that his readers would previously have lived through, though would not necessarily have fathomed. He laid bare certain laws of love, what Schopenhauer termed essential ‘Ideas’ of romantic psychology. He had, for example, perfectly captured the apparently kind – yet infinitely cruel – manner with which the person who does not love deals with the one who does. Late in the novel, tortured by his feelings, Werther breaks down in front of Lotte:
‘Lotte’ he cried, ‘I shall never see you again!’ – ‘Why ever not?’ she replied: ‘Werther, you may and must see us again, but do be less agitated in your manner. Oh, why did you have to be born with this intense spirit, this uncontrollable passion for everything you are close to! I implore you,’ she went on, taking his hand, ‘be calmer. Think of the many joys your spirit, your knowledge and your gifts afford you!’
We need not have lived in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century to appreciate what is involved. There are fewer stories than there are people on earth, the plots repeated ceaselessly while the names and backdrops alter. ‘The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,’ knew Schopenhauer.
In turn, there is consolation in realizing that our case is only one of thousands. Schopenhauer made two trips to Florence, in 1818 and again in 1822. He is likely to have visited the Brancacci chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine, in which Masaccio had painted a series of frescos between 1425 and 1426.
(Ill. 21.1)
The distress of Adam and Eve at leaving paradise is not theirs alone. In the faces and posture of the two figures, Masaccio has captured the essence of distress, the very Idea of distress, his fresco a universal symbol of our fallibility and fragility. We have all been expelled from the heavenly garden.
But by reading a tragic tale of love, a rejected suitor raises himself above his own situation; he is no longer one man suffering alone, singly and confusedly, he is part of a vast body of human beings who have throughout time fallen in love with other humans in the agonizing drive to propagate the species. His suffering loses a little of its sting, it grows more comprehensible, less of an individual curse. Of a person who can achieve such objectivity, Schopenhauer remarks:
In the course of his own life and in its misfortunes, he will look less at his own individual lot than at the lot of mankind as a whole, and accordingly will conduct himself … more as a
knower
than as a
sufferer
.
We must, between periods of digging in the dark, endeavour always to transform our tears into knowledge.
VI
Consolation for Difficulties
1
Few philosophers have thought highly of feeling wretched. A wise life has traditionally been associated with an attempt to reduce suffering: anxiety, despair, anger, self-contempt and heartache.
2
Then again, pointed out Friedrich Nietzsche, the majority of philosophers have always been ‘cabbage-heads’. ‘It is my fate to have to be the first decent human being,’ he recognized with a degree of embarrassment in the autumn of 1888. ‘I have a terrible fear that I shall one day be pronounced holy’; and he set the date somewhere around the dawn of the third millennium: ‘Let us assume that people will be allowed to read [my work] in about the year 2000.’ He was sure they would enjoy it when they did:
It seems to me that to take a book of mine into his hands is one of the rarest distinctions that anyone can confer upon himself. I even assume that he removes his shoes when he does so – not to speak of boots.
A distinction because, alone among the cabbage-heads, Nietzsche had realized that difficulties of every sort were to be welcomed by those seeking fulfilment:
You want if possible – and there is no madder ‘if possible’ –
to abolish suffering
; and we? – it really does seem that
we
would rather increase it and make it worse than it has ever been!
Though punctilious in sending his best wishes to friends, Nietzsche knew in his heart what they needed:
To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities – I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished.
Which helped to explain why his work amounted to, even if he said so himself:
The greatest gift t
hat [mankind] has ever been given.
3
We should not be frightened by appearances.
In the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time … usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression we make. Thus the gentlest and most reasonable of men can, if he wears a large moustache … usually be seen as no more than the appurtenance of a large moustache, that is to say a military type, easily angered and occasionally violent – and as such he will be treated. (Ill. 22.1)
4
He had not always thought so well of difficulty. For his initial views, he had been indebted to a philosopher he had discovered at the age of twenty-one as a student at Leipzig University. In the autumn of 1865, in a second-hand bookshop in Leipzig’s Blumengasse, he had by chance picked up an edition of The World as Will and Representation, whose author had died five years previously in an apartment in Frankfurt 300 kilometres to the west:
I took [Schopenhauer’s book] in my hand as something totally unfamiliar and turned the pages. I don’t know which daimon was whispering to me: ‘Take this book home.’ In any case, it happened, which was contrary to my custom of otherwise never rushing into buying a book. Back at the house I threw myself into the corner of a sofa with my new treasure, and began to let that dynamic, dismal genius work on me. Each line cried out with renunciation, negation, resignation.
The older man changed the younger one’s life. The essence of philosophical wisdom was, Schopenhauer explained, Aristotle’s remark in the Nicomachean Ethics:
The prudent man strives for freedom from pain, not pleasure.
The priority for all those seeking contentment was to recognize the impossibility of fulfilment and so to avoid the troubles and anxiety that we typically encounter in its pursuit:
[We should] direct our aim not to what is pleasant and agreeable in life, but to the avoidance, as far as possible, of its numberless evils … The happiest lot is that of the man who has got through life without any very great pain, bodily or mental.
When he next wrote home to his widowed mother and his nineteen-year-old sister in Naumburg, Nietzsche replaced the usual reports on his diet and the progress of his studies with a summary of his new philosophy of renunciation and resignation:
We know that life consists of suffering, that the harder we try to enjoy it, the more enslaved we are by it, and so we [should] discard the goods of life and practise abstinence.
It sounded strange to his mother, who wrote back explaining that she didn’t like ‘that kind of display or that kind of opinion so much as a proper letter, full of news’, and advised her son to entrust his heart to God and to make sure he was eating properly.
But Schopenhauer’s influence did not subside. Nietzsche began to live cautiously. Sex figured prominently in a list he drew up under the heading ‘Delusions of the Individual’. During his military service in Naumburg, he positioned a photograph of Schopenhauer on his desk, and in difficult moments cried out, ‘Schopenhauer, help!’ At the age of twenty-four, on taking up the Chair of Classical Philology at Basle University, he was drawn into the intimate circle of Richard and Cosima Wagner through a common love of the pessimistic, prudent sage of Frankfurt.
5
Then, after more than a decade of attachment, in the autumn of 1876, Nietzsche travelled to Italy and underwent a radical change of mind. He had accepted an invitation from Malwida von Meysenbug, a wealthy middle-aged enthusiast of the arts, to spend a few months with her and a group of friends in a villa in Sorrento on the Bay of Naples.
(Ill. 22.2)
‘I never saw him so lively. He laughed aloud from sheer joy,’ reported Malwida of Nietzsche’s first response to the Villa Rubinacci, which stood on a leafy avenue on the edge of Sorrento. From the living room there were views over the bay, the island of Ischia and Mount Vesuvius, and in front of the house, a small garden with fig and orange trees, cypresses and grape arbours led down to the sea.
The house guests went swimming, and visited Pompeii, Vesuvius, Capri and the Greek temples at Paestum. At mealtimes, they ate light dishes prepared with olive oil, and in the evenings, read together in the living room: Jacob Burckhardt’s lectures on Greek civilization, Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, La Bruyère, Stendhal, Goethe’s ballad Die Braut von Korinth, and his play Die natürliche Tochter, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato’s Laws (though, perhaps spurred on by Montaigne’s confessions of distaste, Nietzsche grew irritated with the latter: ‘The Platonic dialogue, that dreadfully self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectics, can only have a stimulating effect if one has never read any good Frenchmen … Plato is boring’).
And as he swam in the Mediterranean, ate food cooked in olive oil rather than butter, breathed warm air and read Montaigne and Stendhal (‘These little things – nutriment, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness – are beyond all conception of greater importance than anything that has been considered of importance hitherto’), Nietzsche gradually changed his philosophy of pain and pleasure, and with it, his perspective on difficulty. Watching the sun set over the Bay of Naples at the end of October 1876, he was infused with a new, quite un-Schopenhauerian faith in existence. He felt that he had been old at the beginning of his life, and shed tears at the thought that he had been saved at the last moment.
6
He made a formal announcement of his conversion in a letter to Cosima Wagner at the end of 1876: ‘Would you be amazed if I confess something that has gradually come about, but which has more or less suddenly entered my consciousness: a disagreement with Schopenhauer’s teaching? On virtually all general propositions I am not on his side.’
One of these propositions being that, because fulfilment is an illusion, the wise must devote themselves to avoiding pain rather than seeking pleasure, living quietly, as Schopenhauer counselled, ‘in a small fireproof room’ – advice that now struck Nietzsche as both timid and untrue, a perverse attempt to dwell, as he was to put it pejoratively several years later, ‘hidden in forests like shy deer’. Fulfilment was to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by recognizing its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to reaching anything good.
7
What had, besides the food and the air, helped to change Nietzsche’s outlook was his reflection on the few individuals throughout history who appeared genuinely to have known fulfilled lives; individuals who could fairly have been described – to use one of the most contested terms in the Nietzschean lexicon – as Übermenschen.
The notoriety and absurdity of the word owe less to Nietzsche’s own philosophy than to his sister Elisabeth’s subsequent enchantment with National Socialism (‘that vengeful anti-Semitic goose’, as Friedrich described her long before she shook the Führer’s hand), and the unwitting decision by Nietzsche’s earliest Anglo-Saxon translators to bequeath to the Übermensch the name of a legendary cartoon hero.
Hitler greeting Elisabeth Nietzsche in Weimar, October 1935 (Ill. 22.3)
But Nietzsche’s Übermenschen had little to do with either airborne aces or fascists. A better indication of their identity came in a passing remark in a letter to his mother and sister:
Really, there is nobody living about whom I care
much
. The people I like have been dead for a long, long time – for example, the Abbé Galiani, or Henri Beyle, or Montaigne.
He could have added another hero, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. These four men were perhaps the richest clues for what Nietzsche came in his maturity to understand by a fulfilled life.
They had much in common. They were curious, artistically gifted, and sexually vigorous. Despite their dark sides, they laughed, and many of them danced, too; they were drawn to ‘gentle sunlight, bright and buoyant air, southerly vegetation, the breath of the sea [and] fleeting meals of flesh, fruit and eggs’. Several of them had a gallows humour close to Nietzsche’s own – a joyful, wicked laughter arising from pessimistic hint
erlands. They had explored their possibilities, they possessed what Nietzsche called ‘life’, which suggested courage, ambition, dignity, strength of character, humour and independence (and a parallel absence of sanctimoniousness, conformity, resentment and prissiness).
Montaigne (1533–92) (Ill. 22.4)
Abbé Galiani (1728–87)
Goethe (1749–1832) (Ill. 22.5)
Stendhal/Henri Beyle (1783–1842) (Ill. 22.6)
They had been involved in the world. Montaigne had been mayor of Bordeaux for two terms and journeyed across Europe on horseback. The Neapolitan Abbé Galiani had been Secretary to the Embassy in Paris and written works on money supply and grain distribution (which Voltaire praised for combining the wit of Molière and the intelligence of Plato). Goethe had worked for a decade as a civil servant in the Court in Weimar; he had proposed reforms in agriculture, industry and poor relief, undertaken diplomatic missions and twice had audiences with Napoleon.
(Ill. 22.7)
On his visit to Italy in 1787, he had seen the Greek temples at Paestum and made three ascents of Mount Vesuvius, coming close enough to the crater to dodge eruptions of stone and ash.
(Ill. 22.8)
Nietzsche called him ‘magnificent’, ‘the last German I hold in reverence’: ‘He made use of … practical activity … he did not divorce himself from life but immersed himself in it … [he] took as much as possible upon himself … What he wanted was totality; he fought against the disjunction of reason, sensuality, feeling, will.’
The Consolations of Philosophy Page 16