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| Nietzsche |
Philosopher Nietzsche saw a
man whipping a horse on a street in Turin, Italy. He couldn’t endure the cruel
sight. Rushing towards the animal, the philosopher hugged it before collapsing
to the ground. He never regained his sanity after that.
Nietzsche
despised weakness and sentimentality. He was a social Darwinist who believed in
the right of the fittest to survive. Strength is the ultimate virtue, he said,
and weakness is a vice. Goodness is that which wins while the bad yields to pressure
and perishes.
This
philosopher of strength who counselled people to live dangerously and to erect
their cities beside fuming volcanos and to send out their ships to unexplored
seas could not bear the sight of a horse being whipped by its owner. That was
Nietzsche: a bundle of paradoxes.
He did not
even possess basic health. He was a sickly person right from childhood and he
possessed all the goody-goodiness of such boys. As a little boy, he detested
the “bad boys” of his neighbourhood who robbed birds’ nests, raided neighbours’
orchards, and told lies. His schoolteachers called him “the little minister,”
meaning little priest. His parents were pastors. Some people nicknamed
the little Nietzsche “a Jesus in the Temple.” He was a good boy – too good, in
fact.
He grew up to
despise Christianity, however. He thought it was a religion of weakness. An
effeminate religion with a god who capitulated. Someone who dies on a cross
with a helpless whimper can’t be a god. Christianity’s heaven must be an
utterly boring place with all effeminate souls that never dared to cross the
lines drawn by mediocre morality. Nietzsche walked out of that heaven and
proclaimed the death of god.
And he grew
his moustache long. He was “more moustache than man,” in the words of Eric
Weiner whose book The Socrates Express is my present reading. I remember
another illustrious writer, Will Durant, describing Nietzsche as “the soul of a
girl under the armour of a warrior” [in The Story of Philosophy].
Nietzsche was
not what he thought he was and what he pretended to be. He was too good at
heart to be the Bismarckian Superman that he idolised in his writings. His
heart was more Christian than Saint Francis Assisi’s so much so that the people
of Genoa called him ‘the Saint’.
Nietzsche
held Wagner’s music in contempt for being an effeminate romantic rhapsody that
softened human conscience. But towards the end of his life, in a lucid moment
of his flagging sanity, seeing a picture of the musician who was then dead and
gone, Nietzsche muttered, “Him I loved much.”
What
Nietzsche’s heart loved, his brain did not. That was the paradox that killed
the philosopher “too early – and too late,” as Weiner puts it. Almost a century back from today, Will Durant
had concluded his chapter on Nietzsche with the epitaph, “Seldom has a man paid
so great a price for genius.”
I completed
reading Weiner’s chapter on Nietzsche just a few minutes back. Nietzsche had
always held a charm for me right from my youth. Weiner has added a lot more
colours to that charm and it has now become a rainbow. This is my humble
tribute to the troubled genius tormented by the paradox that he was even to himself.
Beautiful tribute.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this write up on the philosopher Nietzsche which is both informative and enlightening. Written in a very lucid style, though I have never picked him up for reading.
ReplyDeleteNietzsche was a perverted genius, I should say. He wrote wonderful poetry which was philosophy. None of his books were successful in the market!
DeleteHari OM
ReplyDeleteNietzsche was a contrarian, that's for sure. So much of his work is couched in declaritive form and without a lot of very hard work from the reader, there lacks cohesiveness of argument (or any argument at all as such) or an overall concept concluded. It's as if he has simply allowed his intellect to put up all sorts of questions, followed them, but not entirely... what his work does do is instigate thinking in the reader. As long as that reader can be bothered.
On reading from his own writing, "One not only wants to be understood when one writes, but also - quite as certainly - not to be understood. It is by no means an objection to a book when someone finds it unintelligible: perhaps this might just have been the intention of its author, - perhaps he did not want to be understood by 'anyone'," (TGSp.381) amongst others, it could be said that there is an elitist quality to his life approach.
It is considered that he may well have had a slow-growing brain tumour, causing the disturbance involving police then collapse in Turin and subsequent dementia. (No horse involved - apocryphal anecdote.) Genius - yes. Perverted? No. But certainly searching, questioning, challenging, rebellious, paradoxical - and possibly obnoxious! One can certainly not be indifferent to him even on casual reading. ... and it seems the same is perhaps true of TSE which I may have to obtain sooner than later. Stimulating! YAM xx
When the poet and the philosopher blends into one, some obscurity and lack of cohesiveness are natural. Nietzsche provoked and he knew how to do that. I admired him as a young learner of philosophy and then marvelled at his strange genius and now, on reading Weiner, I am left with mixed feelings including sympathy, though the story about the horse might be apocryphal.
DeleteHari Om
DeleteI can understand your sympathy - in these times, it is more likely he would have had better psychological support and assessment. Mental health (never mind actual brain injury and invasion by disease) is still not widely discussed and society has great difficulty accepting those who express differently. Yxx
I've always been intrigued by Nietzsche and his profound thoughts. This was a lovely read.
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