Notes On Nietzsche

The great misapprehension of Nietzsche. Not the monster, the malefactor of annihilation. Not the appropriated Nazi sympathizer. Not the misogynist leveling the whip. Madman perhaps, in later days when spirochete ate away at his cerebral cortex. Instead shy man, devoted friend, child. It has been said (was it Sartre?) that the greater the intellect the greater the need for play.
Nietzsche was a great player. He navigated words the way a ships captain might navigate ice floes, dallied with appearances the way a quiet man becomes an exhibitionist before an audience. His was the great playground of language. Yet associations darken his most elegiac work. For many all they know is at best the work, at worst the accusations. But here was a profoundly gentle man, a deeply spiritual man, carried along the cause of his thought, confused by conventional feelings, yet needing to live amongst ordinary people. Here was a man who seemed vastly ahead of his time, an astonishing intellect, who faced fleeting disappointments with the rancor of a child. In short, here is a man of contradiction.

From the devoted study of the priesthood, to the author of the Antichristian, Nietzsche came to seek absolution not in the body of the church but in the overcoming of his own nature, in the rapture not of the saints, but in that of the evolving self. He often expressed the feeling that the ones who might understand him had yet to be born, that some future being(s) might contain the seedling of his prophecy. True, few contemporaries ever understood him. Most in fact ignored him. It is a great tragedy that what truly introduced him to the general public was the Third Reich, for in his day, Nietzsche deplored nationalism, racism, he despised the notion of Empire, and yet, after his fall, his sister Elisabeth was able to manipulate and obfuscate these references and pervert his work to suit the needs of propaganda.

But Nietzsche never held to any category, never sought type. His vision was not elitist, instead it encompassed everyone. He believed that humanity was capable of greater things, of healthier things, of going beyond its own self imposed limitations. If anything his was a truly Utopian message. The presumed malice in his work stems, less from actual venom and more from exasperation. He sensed that the evolution of humankind was not something involuntary, but rather something which required action, commitment, questions, an effort and desire to transform. His frustration was a question of idle faith. He believed humanity capable of astonishing things, and yet what he witnessed was complacency, laziness, religion. Nietzsche believed in us, but he was unflinching in chastising our procrastination.

He never worried after his reputation, never sought the auspices of leader. He himself knew his own failings and never for a second believed himself to be the first in his evolutionary concept. In this sense he was less arrogant than self sacrificing, and he sometimes spoke about being happy at the notion that another, more prepared for the journey might utilize him as a stepping stone.

His own variegated illnesses seldom found their way into his work, for good reason. He didn't want to become the expression of his sickness, instead he sought to use its effects as fuel to exemplify the need for overcoming, for enduring, for celebrating what could stem from the refusal to succumb. He was not used by his weaknesses, he used them.

And as much metaphor is intrinsic to his work, as much bombast, there is a wonderful simplicity to it all. This too is something of an apparent paradox in Nietzsche, yet it has more to do with the urgent need he had to express, to dance, to poeticize, than to obscure. He wanted to be understood, yet he was unwilling to trivialize his ideas, and besides, he wanted to play.

For as much as he was a philosopher, as much as he was a philologist, he was at all times a musician, a composer and conductor of words. In short he was a lyric poet. His love of the pre-Socratic informed much of his style and filled it with both grace and violence. To an extent, to truly embrace him, one must have song in ones blood. One must recognize the cues and notes inherent in every line, the rhythm of every passage, the poetry of now subterranean, now mountain air.

In a sense reading him requires both stringent focus and pure abandon. Things reverberate in Nietzsche, and they linger long after having read him.

In the end though, it is to be hoped that he might one day be understood in terms both public and private, for it is only then that he becomes less the man of Freidrich's lonley mountain, than the man who, despite himself, becomes beautifully, human, all too human.