My upcoming book, the writing life, is already 600 pages, so I will have to sift through what materials to include. I do not know if I will put in my commentaries on four writers I’ve studied closely --- Nietzsche, Emerson, Zizek, and Rand --- for they might fill up a volume on their own. Every time I pick any of them I am taking careful notes to develop them into lenses for ideas I wish to approach. I was just looking over my notes on Nietzsche, and added or amended give subsections, which will follow this introduction. They concern the following.
1. Quick note on Nietzsche’s method
2. another note relating method to the man Nietzsche
3. a touch up of my translation of the Yes and Amen song, his conclusion for Thus Spoke Zarathustra
4. My breakdown of the structure of his bibliography – this section actually takes the most study, though it is quick and easy
5. A few comments on one of Nietzsche’s early works, some notes for his university lecture on the Presocratic Philosophers.
I actually think I will leave this section for a later book, that it won’t go into my next book. These essays take incredible amounts of digestion, and perpetual practice. For those of you who have studied Nietzsche, your comments are welcome!
Take care, Caretakers!
Daniel Christopher June
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1 (note on method)
Too much energy makes irritable and susceptible. Excess energy must be powered together into one thing. The two modes of mind, focus and selection, use power and energy -- and power presupposes health, just as dissipated energy is disease. For an artistic philosopher like Nietzsche, it is best to be sensual and chaste. His dominant instinct is to reserve his for his projects, and in this, even the great man has a sort of maternal instinct.
Thus, when Nietzsche characterizes himself as immersed in himself, lost in thought, absent minded, then he is his own superman. Energy is forced to truth. We need energy from every source, from every stimulation. We need the inspiration gained from finding and making enemies, and the goad of the foe, whether woman or warrior, makes the eager will of the hero triumphant. Nietzsche is the freespirit, above all else, the overman was a sort of symbol, inverting, perhaps the man under it, the polite thinker, and projecting it towards the sky.
His mind tends to the same few questions, and thus he consumes them, and his energy is tamed. His most interesting question seems to be "what is the value of truth?" Everything else is backdrop and digression to this one vital center. Christianity stands only for the pretense to truth – “what is truth?” downs the whole charade -- by the man of resentment. Though it is his main enemy, he doesn't consider it formidable. Honesty was the one virtue he could not shake -- the very central virtue of Zarathustra: to shoot his arrows straight. Truth required justification.
Truth versus art! Is not such a dilemma embedded in the very fabric of Nietzsche's styles?
2 (method and the man)
"As happens in great men, he seemed by the variety and amount of his powers to be a combination of several persons -- like the giants fruits which are matured in gardens by the union of four or five single blossoms." This may have well been said about the author Nietzsche, if not the person.
If a single man do his duty -- not at all what the world claims is his duty, that is to say, to attend instead to his inner law, too fully true to his innermost -- all the world may perish to save that one, or to say the same thing, all the world lives because of him. For these the universe spins, for these she suffers good and evil.
Every man is a method. A third of what he takes is in his flesh, a third of what he takes is from his world, a third of what he takes is from his uncaused will. Nietzsche is a style. A disciple can write with a Nietzschean pen. The man, for one, never contradicts himself – as no single man ever does – if you consider not the propositional fact of each clause, but the tone, mood, and drift of his overall work. The style is the unity.
As his method, as a series of methods stamped with the style of one personality, we need only look at the shape of his mind – which lives on in the full scale of his works – and we too think with Nietzschean thoughts. Each society, after all, is positioned amidst a series of voices – of heroes and villains, madmen divines – who are eternally interesting to that society. Who we take as our stock of characters is none other than our cultural pantheon, and they are as godly as any being can be. Their voices are the vertices and extremities of our own possibilities. Goethe stands for Germany, but Nietzsche Europe.
Nietzsche was a man of many methods, all centered on his method of power. His use of the catalog is remarkable and breathtaking, almost to the level of the American, such as when he lists all the possible definitions of punishment in his Beyond Good and Evil. Such periodical list making requires an intense familiarity with a broad range of topics -- and indeed he said he considered the nature of morality since early youth. To make such sentences and paragraphs confirms it.
Another unsung virtue is his ability to write up a character sketch of a friend or enemy, as when he characterizes early Christianity, or Wagner, or a hundred others in his marvelous gestures and touches. Let the aspiring writer pay heed.
To say he was the Freespirit is obvious, but to say he was a German God is less so, a subtler theology than even he would allow. The basic psychological problem he presents -- who am I really? How do I become myself? -- takes away the religious trappings and gets at the art of the business. Jesus’ question: "Who do you say I am," is answered, "Whatever I want you to be." With Nietzsche, who he at his center is he does not place into the hands of others, but guards his secrets like a dragon. Among friends, questions of identify melt away. The more I see you, the more I realize myself. The true friend is the best therapist. A shrink can shrink your wallet and heal your neurosis, but a friend can deify you, or better, reveal what inner independence you beat in your own breast.
The gods seem plebian. How a man doesn't fit in with his environment is a commentary on his individuality. That a man is lonely and awkward may speak of his greatness. How shall we characterize such men as this?
If we ask who Nietzsche was, let us take the old dictum: “Judge a man as he judges himself.” He is dynamite: the hinge of history. Granted. What else does he take himself for? Nietzsche's prefaces give a better intellectual autobiography than his Ecce Homo, for while the latter gives a brilliant character sketch of his attitude and method, the former shows a spiritual progression, the man as was defining himself -- and he always defines himself in relation to his works. His place in the heaven of ideas is upon the question of the origin and value of values. He saw different because he was different. Is this blameworthy?
Nietzsche's madness makes his writing not less, but more true. One need not drink the dragon's blood to know that madness is truth. Creativity and insanity are exactly the same thing, only the first is twinned to will, where second overpowers. Though other thinkers, such as Jung, lack the critical faculty, this intellectual conscious was the shining sanity of Nietzsche's genius.
He who is mad is alone in his world -- the rest seem themselves to be bent and addled. The man who goes alone can start today, but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off. And when you take the way to your own unique power, you walk a field without a road, and your feet tread where neither man, angel, nor God has seen or imagined. Don’t match the great man, footstep for footstep, but focus your eyes where he focused his: on your shared goal.
3. THE SEVEN SEALS
(THE YES AND AMEN SONG)
1.
If I am the soothsayer full of that soothsaying spirit which wanders a high ridge between two seas, wandering like heaven’s cloud between past and future, an enemy of all sultry plains of all that is weary and can neither live nor die--in its dark bosom ready for lightening and the redemptive flash, pregnant with lightning bolts that say YES! that laugh YES! soothsaying bolts of lightening-blessed is he who is so pregnant! And verily, long must he hang over mountains like a dark cloud, who shall one day kindle the light of the future: Oh! how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of return?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wished children, unless it be this woman of my love: for I love you, O eternity.
FOR I LOVE YOU, O ETERNITY!
2.
If ever my wrath burst tombs, budged boundary stones, and rolled old tablets, broken down into low steeped depths; if ever my laughing mockery blew moldy words into the whispering wind, and I swept as a broom across the cross-marked spiders and burst as a sweeping gust through old musty tomb chambers; if ever I perched jubilating where old God lied buried, I world-blessing, I world-loving, beside the monument of world-slanders--for I love even churches and tombs of gods, once the sky gazes through their broken roofs with his pure eye, and like grass and red poppies, I love to perch on broken churches: Oh! how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of return?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wished children, unless it be this woman of my love: for I love you, O eternity.
FOR I LOVE YOU, O ETERNITY!
3.
If ever one breath I breathed from the creative breath and of that heavenly need that constrains even accidents to dance their star-dances; if ever I laughed the laughter of creative lightning, followed with the grumbling obedience of the long thunder of the dead; if ever I played dice with gods at gods' table, the earth, till earth quaked and burst and snorted floods of fire--for the earth is a table for gods and trembles with creative new words and the throws of gods: Oh! how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of return?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wished children, unless it be this woman of my love: for I love you, O eternity.
FOR I LOVE YOU, O ETERNITY!
4.
If ever I drank full drafts from that foaming spice-blend mug in which all things are blended; if my hand ever poured the farthest to the near, and fire to spirit, and joy to pain, and most wicked to he most gracious; if I myself am a grain of that redeeming salt which blends all things well in that spice-blend mug--for there is a salt that unites good with evil; and even the greatest evil is worthy of use for spice for the great foaming over: Oh! how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of return?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wished children, unless it be this woman of my love: for I love you, O eternity.
FOR I LOVE YOU, O ETERNITY!
5.
If I am fond of sea and all that is of sea's kind, and fondest when her fury scolds me; if that delight in searching which drives sails toward the undiscovered is also in me, if a seafarer's delight is my delight; if every my jubilation cried, "The coast has vanished, now the last chain has fallen from me!; the boundless roars about me, far abounding the glisten of space and time; be of good cheer, old heart!" Oh! how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of return?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wished children, unless it be this woman of my love: for I love you, O eternity.
FOR I LOVE YOU, O ETERNITY!
6.
If my virtue is the dancer's virtue, and I have often jumped both feet into golden-emerald delight; if my sarcasm is laughing sarcasm, at home under rose slopes and hedges of lilies--for in laughter all that is evil comes together, and, pronounced holy, absolves in its own bliss; and if this is my alpha omega, that all called ‘heavy’ and ‘grave’ becomes light; all that is body, dancer,; all that is spirit, bird--and verily, that is my alpha omega: Oh! how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of return?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wished children, unless it be this woman of my love: for I love you, O eternity.
FOR I LOVE YOU, O ETERNITY!
7.
If ever I spread tranquil skies above myself and soared my wings into those skies; if I swam playfully in the deep light-distance, and my freedom's bird-wisdom came--but bird-wisdom speaks thus: "Behold, there is no above, no below! Throw yourself around, out, back, you who are light! Sing! speak no more! Are not all words made for the heavy and grave? Are not all words lies to those who are light? Sing! Speak no more!" Oh! how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of return?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wished children, unless it be this woman of my love: for I love you, O eternity.
FOR I LOVE YOU, O ETERNITY!
4. Nietzsche’s Tree of Knowledge oYo
“Fertilizer” is the nickname I give to Nietzsche’s aphoristic books, Human all-to-human, The Dawn, and The Gay Science—fertilizer, as Freud called his Interpretation of Dreams, or as Emerson referred to his journals as his savings account. The seed of Birth of Tragedy, clapped shut in the shell of the Untimely Mediations, grew finally into the tree Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a central trunk and branch from which grew the twin branches Beyond Good and Evil, and Genealogy of Morals, whose leaves were his letters and notes of Will to Power, and whose fruits were Twilight of the Idols, springing from Beyond Good and Evil, the Antichrist springing from Genealogy of Morals, and Ecce Homo and Nietzsche Contra Wagner—springing from Zarathustra.
Zarathustra is pure ejaculation, and as a mix of seeds for Venus, requires Psyche’s ants to sort them out. Fortunately, this work was not edited, giving us raw Nietzschean creative flourish. Ecce Homo, which is written in the same spirit as Zarathustra, is insanely hyperbolic, and yet, eventually, proven to be in fact modestly true. Beyond Good and Evil is only about Willful Interpretation. Who is ‘beyond good and evil’? The Good European Superman who must learn to willfully interpret—the last two books of it are the reason the work was written. Every other topic and nuance is mere parable and underscore for its method regarding how to interpret. The methods of interpretation, as created in Beyond, derive from the aphoristic earlier of the fertilizer works, are implied in strict illustration in Genealogy of Morals, which is above all a demonstration, and finally triumph in the superlative fury of Wotan of the Antichrist, in which every pretense of Christianity is outraged.
5. Scholastic Essays – Seed and shell
Nietzsche's early works I hardly touch: I'm no scholar, I am under no compulsion. The breath of Schopenhauer submerges Nietzsche’s buoy of joy, but impetuous is his optimism and it rockets back up. His lecture notes, for instance, regarding the Greeks, though kind enough to praise the greatest people to every live, sings praise, only to spit on his own people. He had grown up eating Hellenic grapes, these were his teachers, these his influence. He says "other people have saints; the Greeks have sages." He then laments that "we have no genuine culture," lacking what the Greeks had: unity of style. Cynical, idealistic, damning and damnable. But Nietzsche outgrew it. He often said that he philosophized in sickness and in health, and thereby he became philosophy's physician. We all grow sick of the idealistic idiots who whine about the degradation of culture. They lack amor fati, they do not know they chose this place for a reason, and their triumph could happen in no other time. The Schopenhauer quotes are a stench, but his teeming adulations of Heraclitus shine through -- how he loved the man! How he considered Heraclitus the type of the philosopher -- for the Greeks had invented "all the philosophical archetypes." Nietzsche effuses: "His fame concerns humanity, not him; the immortality of humanity needs him, not the immortality of the man, Heraclitus. What he saw, the teaching of Law in Becoming, and of play in necessity, must be seen from now on in all eternity. He raised the curtain on the greatest of dramas.”
All the gab about unity of style making a culture was easy for the Nazis to adapt, and it is even true, for what its worth, but culture not such a rare blooming flower as the young fumer imagined. He is correct to define the everlasting in each philosophy not in its truth, but in its personality. Philosophy is the art of Man Thinking, and behind the thoughts, man himself. Man abides. Man is truth. Art is irrefutable. And with the same craving for style, Nietzsche made a second immortality for himself.
Those who believe in no heaven hope for fame. Was Nietzsche after the Heraclitian immortality, or historical fury?
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