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NIETZSCHE
Attempt at a Mythology
By Ernst Bertram
University of Illinois Press
Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07601-5
Chapter One
Ancestry Poets, however, establish what remains. —Hölderlin
Then the past enduring, The future lives in advance—The moment is eternity. —Goethe
Everything revolutionary both obeys and enforces the law that ensures that the best part of what is opposed actually continues to endure. Revolution, above all in the spiritual realm—and every revolution is ultimately spiritual—is the rejuvenating bath of all that endures. Catiline, according to Nietzsche, is the preliminary form of existence of every Caesar: all legitimate greatness must first traverse the stage of disreputable and criminal illegality. Yet Caesar, as a type, also requires repeated baptism in the Catiline element. Caesar, as a rightful heir, always has to remember that he possesses an usurper's power within himself so as not to wither away in mere Augustan legitimacy; yet Catiline is also Caesar's forefather and thus even in revolt occupies a legitimate place in the order of things. Those who bring the most novel wickedness and outrage at the same time always preserve and restore what has been accepted all along. The truly revolutionary element of an epoch, that which is most genuinely novel and the most vital, is simultaneously always somehow the most deeply rooted in the ancestral past—nemo contra regem nisi rex ipse. The Catilinian bearers of the new are usually never aware of this law within themselves or become conscious of it very late, just as they are on the threshold of their own legitimacy. For no one may guess where the wind of the spirit is coming from or where it is going if it is to embolden the setting of sails for new shores. No one may suspect that sailing around his world will only lead him back to his own harbor. And it is no doubt an integral part of Nietzsche's nature—that perplexing, very rare, and always fateful double refraction that unites, in hermaphroditic fashion, the thirst for understanding with a demonic blindness—that this Genovese spirit and seeker of the most distant seas, of the most hidden shores of knowledge and the soul, nevertheless seems to have known from early on that he was bound by the same ancestral law, that his being occupied a fixed and determined place, even that his circuit had a tragic limit. That he knew "from whence I came"—and where he would end. Perhaps the pseudo-revelation of the Eternal Return, that deceptively teasing delusional mystery imagined by the late Nietzsche, is only the symbolization of the shudder, of the vertigo one feels when faced by the inexorably closing ring, the return to the haven of oneself. The more one learns, the more one knows, the more one sees: round and round it all goes—thus the mystical warning contained in Goethe's dictum. The eternal return of all things within himself, the intellectual circumnavigator's pedagogical secret, which constantly threatens to erupt in festively extravagant ecstasy, the triumphantly conscious curse of having to return to the eternally same port of origin, this seems to be only the metaphysical form, the demonic formula, of the deep ancestral feeling that from the beginning throbs in Nietzsche's blood and mind. This man who more than any other craved, who reveled in transformation, who was more aware of his own transformations than anyone else—"only he who changes will remain akin to me"—is still bound like almost no other leader of souls and seducer of minds by the strongest inner obligation and attraction to conscious tradition, to the idea of inheritable enduring values, to the affirmation of being determined by one's ancestors. The man who called for the destruction of the Old Tablets and advocated love for the "land of your children"—that same person expresses reverence for ancestry in everything he preaches, indeed even in the way he preaches it. The disciple of Wagner who is intoxicated with hope, for whom the art of his master is the true "music of the future" heralding a completely new culture, that same man writes in the preliminary studies for "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth": "I could also imagine a forward-looking art that seeks its images in the future. Why does such a thing not exist? Art is connected to piety." What an odd image: this radical and transvaluer of values for whom "duration on earth is a value of the first order!" this glorifier of the delirious Dionysian present, of the Sacred Moment, who also declares that it is not the strength but the duration of an elevated feeling that constitutes elevated men! The same man who believed that in every respect he brought not peace but the sword, who took pride in exultation ("I swear to you that in two years we will have the earth in convulsions"), also confided to his own heart: "I want to give back to people the tranquility without which no culture can develop and endure. Even my style [should be] a reflection of this effort, a result of the most concentrated power of my nature."
This cultural revolutionary and transvaluer—who counted Stifter's Nachsommer (Indian summer), the most blissfully tranquil work in all of German literature, among his most beloved books—took the great, productively self-renewing duration of the highest human values as his guiding dream. The mother of all human duration, however, its wellspring and guarantee, is memory. Memory created humanity, just as it has created every kind of human community. "Whoever has memory ought never to envy anyone"—Goethe confided that remark to his diary not in retrospective old age but in his pre-Weimar days. To be in the midst of the most vital moment of youth and to remain respectfully mindful of that power whose magic alone expands the moment into eternity—if that is Goethean (and Goethean too is the lack of envy both in and based on the feeling of ownership that arises from the ability to commemorate)—then it is preeminently Nietzschean as well. Even despite the Untimely Meditation on "The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life," a work that should be understood and interpreted as a bold cure and antidote for his own inner temptation to indulge in an exaggerated idolization of all great traditions, of all merely retrospective memorializing—a romantic temptation. (As always with Nietzsche, here too he means and opposes an adversary that is external to himself only in the superficial sphere—namely his own desiccated era, bled dry by the all-too-historical urge; at a deeper level the book, like every one of these books that arose out of greater suffering than any others during his century, was a battle with himself, a struggle with his most pressing and most cherished danger, an act of self-defense and a sacrifice.) A gratitude for memory, a deliberate, self-consciously heightened and productively interpreted dependence on the past in biological, intellectual, and spiritual terms: on this, as on a firm psychological fact, rests a significant part of Nietzsche's intellectual life. The only one of the Old Tablets that the laboriously and artificially hardened hammer of his will left unbroken during certain radical periods in his life was the genealogical one. Duration, continuity, reverence for tradition as the basis of all culture, spirituality, humanity—here we have the most powerful fundamental ideas that attracted the young student at Schulpforta to ancient philology, that transformed the free spirit of the Human, All Too Human into the visionary of Zarathustra. "Preservation of tradition is the main task," he wrote shortly after arriving in Basel; "a magnificent, unobstructed view from the heights. Both are eminently compatible." "In revolutions everything is forgotten," Napoleon once said, and therefore Nietzsche hates everything revolutionary as perhaps no other person has ever hated it. The "will, instinct, and imperative" of tradition lives deep within him, which in the Twilight of the Idols he identifies as the prerequisite for every lasting institution, a will that is "antiliberal to the point of malevolence: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility over the course of centuries, to solidarity with generational ties stretching backward and forward ad infinitum." Tradition—so often nothing more than a refuge and rhetorical cover for creative impotence and senility—is here passion, intoxication, even demonic possession. None of our other thinkers betrays such obsession with ancestry coupled with such individualistic isolation, virtually none shows such a strongly pronounced "thinking in terms of generations." The old saying "woe be to you that you are a grandson" seems to be turned into its exact opposite: "Everything good is an inheritance"—those are some of the most deeply experienced words Nietzsche ever uttered, the most deeply rooted in his nature. "The good things," he was still saying even in the Twilight of the Idols, "are immoderately costly: and the law always applies that whoever has them is someone other than the one who acquires them. Everything good is an inheritance: whatever is not inherited is imperfect, is a beginning." It is true that Zarathustra, by contrast, knows that it is dangerous to be an heir. But, for him, danger ennobles, danger legitimizes, it proves, gives evidence of value, danger is value. The danger of inheritance: that is for Nietzsche nothing other than the happiness, the distinction of inheritance.
This double feeling for heredity—that to be an heir is a blessing and a danger, that every heir is privileged and marked—is combined in a completely unparalleled fashion with Nietzsche's peculiarly strong and willfully emphatic sense of family. Every reader of Nietzsche feels the strangely conscious adherence to blood, the proud fatalism of his fantastical and strict love of ancestry, which only increases all the more as the years go by ("only in the man do the typical family traits become completely visible; they are least apparent in easily excitable, suggestible adolescents. Calm must have settled over them first," we read in the Notebooks for the Transvaluation; and there, too, even: "One is the child of one's four grandparents much more than of one's two parents.... The seeds of our grandfather's type become ripe within us, the seeds of our parents in our children"). He thought he owed the singularity of his nature, which was in every sense so extreme, to the particular mixture in his blood of opposing elements (opposed with regard to nationality, temperament, innate ethos, the degree of vitality), a biological mixture that he even amplified and stylized into something legendary, super-German, and half-German. Inheritance from two conflicting components defines his life for him as a task, a distinction, a fate. For the person standing under the most acute tensions suffers from and experiences life as a task of reconciliation, of uniting what cannot be united. He is the storm-laden cloud born of an antagonistic polarity, which can discharge itself to bring both ruin and fruitful blessings. Ecce homo, above all, plays on this theme, whose basic motif betrays the romantic musician, as unromantic as he would like its exposition to appear. But two years earlier, in a letter to his sister, Nietzsche already drew on the same basic sentiment when he spoke of "our true family type, which excels in reconciling contrasts." And his sister herself once offered the opinion that her brother had his ideality from his father, but his sense of reality and his skepticism toward human affairs from his maternal forebears; Nietzsche, she claimed, felt this too. In the very first words of his autobiography, Nietzsche gave voice to a fundamental feeling of dependence on the particular ancestral mixture within him: "Why I am so wise. The good fortune of my existence, its singularity perhaps, lies in its fate: to express it in the form of a puzzle, I am already dead as my father, as my mother I am still alive and growing old. This dual descent, as it were, from the highest and lowest rungs on the ladder of life, at once décadent and a beginning—this, if anything, explains that neutrality, that freedom from any partiality with respect to the entire problem of life, which perhaps distinguishes me." What gratitude, a few pages later, for the paternal heritage of his so extraordinary life: "I consider it a great privilege to have had such a father: it even seems to me that that explains all of the other privileges I have—not including life, the great Yes to life. Above all that there is no need for me to intend to do so, but merely to bide my time in order to enter involuntarily into a world of elevated and tender things: I am at home there, my innermost passion becomes free only there.... To understand even a little of my Zarathustra one must perhaps need to have a constitution similar to mine—with one foot beyond life." For an extremely strange feeling of mystical dependence, even of a mysteriously supercausal connection, links him with the early departed existence of his father: "My father died at the age of thirty-six: he was delicate, kind, and frail, like a creature allotted only a temporary stay—more a benevolent memory of life than life itself. In the same year in which his life declined, my own also declined: in the thirty-sixth year of my life I landed at the lowest point of my vitality—I was still alive but unable to see three steps ahead of me." This mysteriously intensified repetition of the father's life in the life of his son is also echoed in Zarathustra: "What the father left unsaid is expressed in the son; and I have often found the son to be the father's disclosed secret." A letter to Gast written in Genoa just at the time he was composing Zarathustra sounds mystical: "It is pouring rain, from the distance I hear music playing. That I like this music and how I like it is something I cannot explain from my own experience, rather from that of my father. And why should not—?"—here the letter mysteriously breaks off. And another letter from the same time admits to Overbeck: "From my childhood on, the sentence 'my greatest danger lies in feeling pity' has been confirmed again and again—perhaps the evil consequence of the extraordinary nature of my father, whom everyone who knew him counted more among the 'angels' than among human beings." Nietzsche's friend Deussen relates in his memoirs that during a visit to Sils Maria in August 1887 Nietzsche showed him a requiem (apparently the Hymn to Life) he had composed for his own funeral, and said: "I think that I will not last much longer; I am now at the age at which my father died, and I feel that I will succumb to the same affliction he did."
But if such curious individual confessions tend to emphasize the danger, even the curse of his paternal heritage, the overall evaluation of this heritage still comes entirely out of a proud gratitude, out of something like a feeling of nobility. The conscious adherence to the family pride in "the racial quality of those who are named Nietzsche" accompanies him to the end of his days: "To prefer to die rather than to abandon one's cause: now that is Nietzschean!" he writes about his sister in 1887, to whom a year later he admits: "How strongly I feel in everything you say and do that we belong to the same race: you understand more about me than do others because your body shares the same origin. That fits very well with my 'philosophy.'" Similarly, to his brother-in-law: "in summa, a courageous future awaits my sister. In all of that she resembles me: it appears this belongs to our race." Or to his friend Gersdorff: "Our Nietzschean way, which I have been delighted to discover even in all of my father's siblings, takes delight only in its independence, knows how to occupy itself and sooner gives to people than asks much from them."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from NIETZSCHE by Ernst Bertram Copyright © 2009 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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