Reflections on Nietzsche

I picked up Irvin Yalom's When Nietzsche Wept today, and have read about a third of it so far. It's a nice break from Adorno and various texts about Stalinist nationalism without being stupid. The book reminds me of Leonid Tsypkin's Summer in Baden-Baden, although it is much more straightforward in narrative terms than the latter book, with its intertwinement of Dostoevsky in Baden and the Dostoevsky-obsessed narrator in Leningrad a hundred years later. I found the following passage striking:

And the way Nietzsche dared to say things! Imagine! To say that hope is the greatest evil! That God is dead! That truth is an error without which we cannot live! That the enemies of truth are not lies, but convictions! That the final reward of the dead is to die no more! That physicians have no right to deprive a man of his own death! Evil thoughts! He had debated Nietzsche on each. Yet it was a mock debate: deep in his heart, he knew Nietzsche was right.

And Nietzsche's freedom! What would it be like to live as he lived? No house, no obligations, no salaries to pay, no children to raise, no schedule, no role, no place in society. There was something alluring about such freedom. Why did Friedrich Nietzsche have so much of it and Josef Breuer so little? Nietzsche has simply seized his freedom. Why can't I? groaned Breuer. He lay in bed growing dizzy with such thoughts until the alarm rang at six. (Yalom, 75)

I won't bother locating it now, but there's a passage in Beyond Good and Evil about the terrible danger that faces the great man when he leaves behind the herd and the morality of the herd to create his own morality and to shape himself as he wills. No one will be there to aid him; no one will even know when some demon of conscience devours him in his isolation. That is Nietzsche's freedom. If that is something to be desired, then it is certainly not from the point of view of someone seeking escape from suffering. The best escape from suffering is death. Nietzsche is the consummate philosopher of death's opposite; that is, of life; that is, of suffering.

We have still not taken Nietzsche's insights to heart. God is not dead for the majority of the American population, even if he is crippled and emasculated, seeking refuge in the dingy corners that have not yet fallen under the scrutiny of science, its gaze "blank and pitiless as the sun." Where are the Christians who reject science instead of feebly trying to co-opt its rhetoric? Such people do exist, undoubtedly. But the religiosity of the great mass of Americans is a precarious tightrope act with only the flimsiest defenses helping them balance above the abyss.

As far as his refusal to credit the ego with the origin of thought, also in BGE, how long will it be before such an idea enters the popular discourse? Academic thought may have exploded the complacent idea of a coherent and fundamental subject decades ago, but how have those insights changed the lived experience of the vast majority of people? Fragmented though they may be, they would adamantly assert their coherence. We still acknowledge our surreptitious belief in the "Great Man" theory of history by crediting individuals with the ideas that appear in their works.

On a tangentially related note, I have always had difficulty understanding Nietzsche's condemnation of pity, despite Walter Kaufmann's qualifications, as anything except a criticism, to paraphrase Nietzsche crudely, of pity's tendency to multiply misfortune. However, Adorno and Horkheimer, as usual, offer a brilliant illumination in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Why aren't books like this required university reading? Each book of this magnitude is a new set of eyes, a towering new height from which to see ever more of the world [but a height equipped with telescopes to see new minutiae as well]!).

[Pity] confirms the rule of inhumanity by the exception it makes [. . .] The narcissistic deformations of pity, like the effusions of philanthropists and the moral complacency of the social welfare worker, are still an internalized endorsement of the difference between rich and poor. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 80-81)

It's a troubling idea - that by commiserating with the particular suffering person, we tacitly accept the normalcy of suffering. A seemingly heartless unearthing of the entwinement of reason and domination, an embittered condemnation of the entire order in which inequality and preventable suffering are facts of daily life, becomes the morally superior act.

To add yet another reference to this already excessive list, Benjamin apparently dreamt of a work consisting entirely of quotations. I think I can see the appeal of such a project: to be the unobtrusive facilitator of a conversation that overcomes all constraints of space and time to bring together the greatest minds who have expressed opinions on the subject in question. But is that all the appeal I see in this idea, or is there something more? It is a commentary that doesn't add a single word to the corpus of commentaries. There is something else there, but the insight isn't forthcoming. I guess, following Nietzsche, that its time hasn't come yet.