773:7... . n ATV. 1.. m. . .. 1.. . .11. . . , .. u r ..1..... . h. . . 1 .. n . .. . 1. I HIGAN STATE lllllll ILIH Willilimit 31 931110891 9403 This is to certify that the thesis entitled NIETZSCHE ' S UNTIMELY MEDITATIONS ON CULTURE presented by Dimitrios Athanasios Sengos has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for M. A. History degree in (kw- Major profes or Date 10-10-1990 0-7639 MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution l l LIBRARY [M'Chlgan State . Unlverslty PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record. TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due. .______ DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DU?" l _—:11 MSU In An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity lnditution ammo-9.: NIETZSCHE'S UNTIMELY MEDITATIONS ON CULTURE BY Dimitrios Athanasios Sengos A THESIS Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of History 1990 (6:5:i“‘c33/C:C) ABSTRACT NIETZSCHE'S UNTIMELY MEDITATIONS ON CULTURE BY Dimitrios Athanasios Sengos This thesis reconstructs the idea of culture implied by Friedrich Nietzsche in the four separate essays, collectively titled "Untimely Meditations". A careful reading of these essays shows that Nietzsche believed that culture was the common philosophy of a society that forms the basis for constructive interaction. Through art, artists convey the basic necessities of the nation by an examination of its emotions. By examining both art and experience, philosophers formulate the philosophy or worldview which people in a community use to constitute a shared body of knowledge and a common history. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Peter Vinten-Johansen and Dr. David LoRomer for their guidance and recommendations. A ‘ iii INTRODUCTION Chapter TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Art, Artists and Culture ............. II. Philosophers, Philosophy and Culture . III. Knowledge, History and Culture ....... BIBLIOGRAPHY iv 10 52 79 108 INTRODUCTION Nietzsche's idea of culture is significant because modern societies often lack integrative symbolic forms and common worldviews. A major characteristic of modern Western societies is the absence of worldviews by which people can relate to one another and the world they share. Nietzsche believed that the emphasis modern people place on rational analysis prevents them from constructing a shared worldview. He holds that the eruption of irrational behavior on a large scale since the fifteenth century was due to the destruction of the integrative worldviews of past societies. Nietzsche's examination of culture in his "Untimely Meditations" (1873-6)-- four essays published after The Birth of Tragedy-- is valuable because it implies that people can give a unity and meaning to their existence through a particular use of feeling. Nietzsche's examination also merits close scrutiny as a significant opposing view to the reigning materialist perspective on culture prevalent since his time. For Nietzsche, the particular nature of the worldview that predominates among a people was an expression of, and has a determining effect on, the character and quality of that people's cultural practice. This view placed Nietzsche in opposition to the 1 a. 2 materialist view which stated that a change in society's worldview was always the result of a change in that society's social relations.1 This essay argues that Nietzsche believed that a people's worldview controls the way a nation structures its society. Nietzsche thought that the sharing of a common view of life made for a well-functioning’society since a common perspective gives people a familiar frame of reference when relating to one another. According to Nietzsche, true culture only existed when a society shared a common worldview. Each chapter in this paper is organized around the concept that culture is built around a common view of life. In his "Untimely Meditations", Nietzsche implied that a shared perspective was the basis for effective communication between the people of a nation. The chapters of this paper deal with how artists and philosophers can contribute to the formation of a common worldview by which people of a community can approach knowledge, history, and one another. One half of every chapter will discuss what Nietzsche considered weaknesses in 'modern culture, or’ hOW’ artists and. philosophers can prevent the development of a nation's common perspective. The other half of every chapter will discuss how Nietzsche thought culture could be improved-- that is, how a 1 Robert E. McGinn, "Culture as Prophylactic: Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy as Cultural Criticism," Nietzsche Studien 4 (1975) (hereafter cited as "Culture"), pp. 108 and 137-8; K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Work_s_ (New York: International publ., 1936), Vol. 1, p. 363. 3 society's values could be integrated by artists and philosophers. Since Nietzsche often constructed his arguments through contrast, I will often discuss his conceptions of inferior cultural forms and expressions. The topic sentences of paragraphs, the introductory paragraphs to each of the six sections, and the analysis of quotes--signalled. by conditional sentence constructions-- usually contain my interpretative remarks. other statements are usually paraphrases of Nietzsche's ideas. The connections among art, artists and philosophers, knowledge and history explored in this thesis are imbedded in Nietzsche's "Untimely Meditations". The major contribution of this thesis is to reconstruct what Nietzsche appears to have assumed about culture and its "proper" role in society. I begin with a discussion of art and artists because Nietzsche believed that artists expressed the common needs of a people through an exploration of their feelings. Philosophers came next in the process, first discerning the common outlook of a society in its art and ways of life, then formulating a philosophy or worldview upon which people would organize their knowledge of the world and their own history. This thesis concludes with a chapter on knowledge and history since Nietzsche seemed to believe that these were essential elements in the construction of cultural values that regulated interactions in a well-functioning society. Chapter one begins by discussing Nietzsche's 4 assumption that the art of his time lacked stylistic unity, indicative of a fragmented worldview. The second part of chapter one shows Nietzsche's alternative-- that an integrated worldview is based on the artistic discovery of common necessities and emotions in a community. He assumed that such an exploration must be initiated by artists and then rationally articulated by philosophers. Chapter two begins with Nietzsche's argument that mass education in modern societies threatened the emergence of philosophers able to carry out such a task. The next part of the chapter analyzes Nietzsche's view that philosophers could only be engendered through individualized education. Nietzsche believed that individualized. education. aids jphilosophers in. creating' a common worldview by ridding them of the banal qualities they inherited from society and by helping them to discover what is best or eternal in themselves, and therefore eternal in their time. He believed that it is the philosopher's job to discover what is eternal about the time his people are living in, to come up with a common worldview, a common meaning for life, to which people can relate their activities and find meaning. The philosopher accomplishes this task by discerning his people's outlook on life through his compatriots' art and experience. The last chapter examines Nietzsche's belief that if people do not have a shared idea by which to organize their knowledge of the world, they will lack the capacity 5 to act constructively ‘within. that.‘worldn .According to Nietzsche, a common worldview created by philosophers would provide the only certain foundation on which scholars and scientists could pursue knowledge and history that was useful to the community. In general, Nietzsche has been considered a moral rather than a cultural philosopher. Even though Nietzsche's perspective on culture offers a valuable counter-weight to the materialist interpretation of history, there are only two studies on his idea of culture. In Friedrich Nietzsche: Philosopher of Culture (1942), Frederick. C. Copleston argued that. Nietzsche's life and work was based on a guiding principle that his contemporaries should be summoned to a new cultural ideal-- the transformation of mankind into Superman-- a term Copleston equated with self-improvement. Copleston stated that Nietzsche derided moralities based on ostensible weakness of character and on ideologies supporting mediocrity, and extolled the rise of humanity to continued greatness in all areas of life. Nietzsche condemned all aspects of life-- governments, religion, morality, etc.-- that he believed hindered the growth of humanity, and praised aspects which favored the improvement of mankind. My thesis complements Copleston's survey by showing in detail how' Nietzsche ‘thought. art, artists, philosophers, philosophy, knowledge and history could contribute to culture. In addition, it shows that Nietzsche believes 6 that culture was based on a common view of life held by a people. Nonetheless, I part company with Copelston's view that Nietzsche's concept of culture was essentially destructive. Copleston believed that Nietzsche's View of culture provided no ties between mankind and eternity (the "Transcendent-Immanent. Godhead") because INietzsche argued that God does not exist. For Copleston, when a belief in God does not exist among a people, the necessary spiritual foundation for culture is lacking. But Copleston misconstrued Nietzsche's perception of the spiritual on this point.2 For Nietzsche, the spiritual foundation of cultural values did not rest on a belief in God but on metaphysical elements in a common worldview, as articulated in philosophy. I am indebted to Robert E. McGinn's "Culture as prophylactic: Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy as cultural criticism" (1975) for suggesting a corrective to Copleston. According to McGinn, The Birth of Tragedy argued that the activities characteristic of Hellenic culture were based on a fear originating in the problematic nature of human existence. McGinn analyzed Nietzsche's belief that Attic tragedy permitted Greeks to face the horrible destructiveness of nature by embedding a grim worldview within a glimmering artistic framework. I have borrowed McGinn's view that Nietzsche considered art and philosophy 2 Frederick Copleston, Friedrich Nietzsche- Philosopher of Culture (London: Search Press, 1942), ix, x. 7 essential for people to be able to adapt and live creatively in society. According to McGinn, Nietzsche believed that societies that evolved a shared worldview possessed "culture"-- the outcome of vivifying contact with the metaphysical realm as facilitated by art and philosophy. McGinn also pointed to Nietzsche's critique of modernity-- that societies since the scientific revolution lacked integrating and common worldviews, and were therefore culture-less (by Nietzsche's criteria). Nietzsche's assumption that true culture requires common worldviews is also present in the essays he wrote after The Birth of Tragedy and is the subject of this thesis.3 Nietzsche's ideas about culture were part of the central task of his life's work, discovering and articulating the will-to-power. As such, Nietzsche was part of a revolt against reason that occurred during the late nineteenth century. The revolt against reason stressed intuition, emotion, and subjectivity. Nietzsche's belief that a society possesses culture only if it has a philosophy or understanding of existence by which live is similar to the belief held by some of the "Life Philosophers" of his time, such as George B. Shaw, Henri Bergson, and Samuel Butler. For the life philosophies, will acted creatively on matter and could bend it to meet 3 McGinn, "Culture", pp. 128-9 and 136-7. 8 certain purposes.4 For Nietzsche, life or will starts with a people's understanding of existence and with people's use of this understanding to live constructively within their society. It is living creatively or "powerfully" within one's environment that Nietzsche defines as the will to power. For Nietzsche, the will to power is the drive which seeks to make people understand themselves and the world around them so that they are better capable of assuming control over their destinies. Nietzsche believed that the common worldview of a people given to them by philosophers forms the basis by which the knowledge of the world around them was organized and understood. It is this aspect of the will to power that his "Untimely Meditations" address. The drive for people to understand themselves is an aspect of the will to power treated more frequently in his later writings. * * * During‘ the late leighteenth. century, "Kultur" was defined as the condition of a person who made progress toward enlightenment. In the early nineteenth century, the employment of "Kultur" in German discourse declined in favor of the term "Geist" (spirit). By the 18505, the word "kultur" began to be used in a form still in vogue today-- "the totality of the spiritual and artistic forms of 4 Franklin Baumer, Modern European Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 375-7. 9 expression of a people."5 In the "Untimely Meditations", Nietzsche used culture in this descriptive sense as artistic and intellectual activity like music, philosophy, writing, drama, etc. But he meant more that a simple composite or accumulation of activity; for Nietzsche, culture constituted the interlocking matrix of human expression that embodied the spirit of a people. Thus, Nietzsche added an evaluative component to culture-- how interlocking, or integrated, was a people's worldview, as exhibited in many kinds of activities? "High culture" was equivalent to the interlocking matrix of artistic and intellectual wares in a society, "low culture" to fragmented and disparate artistic and philosophical expressions in a society lacking a common worldview.6 5 Das Grosse Worterbuch (Gutersloh: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1967), p. 2187. 5 see also McGinn, "Culture", pp. 77-9. I. Art, Artists and Culture The first part of chapter one will show that Nietzsche believed that the art of his contemporaries did not provide for the means by which the discovery of a philosophy of life can be expressed so as to be useful to people. These means were not provided for because the art of the time, especially in Germany, was not well supported financially, was technically inferior, and did not contain a unity of style-- a single idea by which the art was guided. Nietzsche defined unity of style as a union of people under a shared way of looking at the world. He believed that the basis of culture lay upon a life which unites its many disparate activities under a single perspective, a common worldview. He considered unity of style crucial to culture since he believed culture consisted of the activities of people tied by a shared outlook on life. 'Using David Strauss as an example, Nietzsche argued that because contemporary German cultural philistines wanted to secure a place for themselves in society, they made it appear as though their art works contained a unity of style when they in fact did not. One reason Nietzsche thought the art works of his contemporaries did not contain a unity of style was because the artists they were ‘made by did not take knowledge 10 11 seriously. They failed to take into consideration the work of controversial thinkers and trivialized important subject matters and works of art. Secondly, philistine artists did not take into consideration the "pessimistic" findings of modern science which stated that the universe did not operate under any moral imperative. Finally, Nietzsche believed that the art of his time was not capable of engendering the unity of style essential for culture because it did not contain an element common to all great art, an expression of the feelings which are, above ideas themselves, the fountain from which culture springs forth. It was the low quality of his country's artistic and intellectual products, and the slight attention paid to cultural pursuits, that led Nietzsche to the conclusion that the people of his time were incapable of creating a culture. In the beginning of his first "Untimely Meditation", Nietzsche started his attempt to engender the creation of German culture by criticizing Germans who believed that their recent victory in war denoted cultural greatness. Nietzsche began his essay "David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer" (1873) by arguing that it was a mistake for German public opinion, as expressed in most periodicals, to assume that victory in war over France in 1871 meant that German culture ‘was superior' to French culture. There were two reasons Nietzsche believed German public opinion erred in making such an assumption. The first reason was because victory in war required placing 12 the resources of Germany into mainly military as opposed to cultural ventures, thereby sapping German cultural production}L Nietzsche viewed military products as the ability of a nation to defend itself and to wage war. He saw cultural products as a people's intellectual and artistic wares. "The wonder", he stated, "is that that which at present calls itself 'culture' in Germany proved so small an obstacle to the military demands which had to be met for the achievement of a great success."2 This quote from the essay shows that in addition to believing that the Franco-Prussian War had hindered German cultural growth, Nietzsche also believed that German culture was small in stature even before the war broke out. For Nietzsche, cultural pursuits should be taken more seriously than military pursuits, since the former are what gives a nation its identity. After a nation has established its cultural identity, the protection of its identity through the military can then be addressed further. Nietzsche wrote against German public opinion not only because he thought that it overestimated the value of contemporary German culture, but also because he believed this overestimation would obstruct the growth of German culture. If culture "is now allowed to grow and luxuriate, 1 Peter Bergmann, Nietzsche. The Last Anti-Political German (Bloomingdale: Indiana U., 1987), pp. 94-7. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. Hollingdale, (New York: Vintage, 1969) (hereafter cited as Untimely), p. 4. 13 if it is pampered with the flattering delusion that victory belonged to it, then it will ... have the power to extirpate the German spirit".3 Perhaps Nietzsche was saying that if Germans believed that German culture was much stronger than it really was, they would have found less of a need in investing more of their energies in cultural pursuits, and would waste their time exalting a culture which was paltry. That which expresses a given nation's character, which Nietzsche called spirit, results from the work of a nation's producers of art. For Nietzsche, the above-mentioned actions by Germans would lead to an "extirpation of the German spirit" because the growth of a culture or a national spirit is the product of a nation's artistic growth. For cultural development to occur, he seemed to think, an estimation of the kind and degree of culture a nation possessed is essential. In fact, it was a realistic estimation of German culture which Nietzsche tried to ‘present in. his first two "Untimely Meditations". In addition to believing that Germans' false conviction that Germany had a strong culture would lead to the crushing of German culture, Nietzsche attested that German art was weak because it lacked a unity of style. He viewed German cultivatedness as the antithesis of culture. By cultivatedness he may have meant a knowledge of past culture. By culture he might have meant an idea and 3 Ibid. l4 feeling around which to base contemporary culture. He wrote: I sense this joy and jubilation [over the apparent strength of German culture] in the incomparable self- assurance of our German journalists and manufacturers of novels, tragedies, songs, and histories... for these types patently belong together in a single guild which seems to have entered into a conspiracy to take charge of the leisure and ruminative hours of modern man-- that is to say his 'cultural moments'-- and in these to stun him with printed paper. Nietzsche was saying that the products of culture are not something which should be taken lightly and created mainly for the purposes of entertainment or the cultivation of people. He believed that even the learned classes of his time were not concerned with culture, but with the accumulation of knowledge. For Nietzsche, contributors to culture employ knowledge to discover a ‘unified 'way of looking at the world, which then forms the basis by which future knowledge is discovered, comprehended, and organized. "Culture is, above all", he stated, unity in all the expressions of the life of a people. Much knowledge or learning' is neither" an essential means to culture nor a sign of it, and if needs be can get along ‘very’ well with. the opposite of culture, barbarism, which is a lack of style or a chaotic jumble of all styles. It is in such a chaotic jumble of styles that the German of our day dwells.5 Creating works of art without taking into consideration the nature of the time and place in which they are made, he may have been contending, does not provide a basis around which the unity needed for culture can take root, and such was 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., p. 5-6. 15 the case with the art objects produced in the Germany of his day.5 Nietzsche argued that the search to find a style around which to unite German art was discontinued by Germany's cultural philistines. He held that the reason why Germans refuse to admit that they are not in possession of a genuine culture was because such an admission was prohibited by the cultural philistine, a type of person dominant in Germany. A German cultural philistine "is firmly convinced that his 'culture' is the complete expression of true German culture".7 Nietzsche was perhaps saying that philistines were people who believed that by expressing' their' own. personality ("his 'culture'") they were at the same time expressing that of their nation at large. The belief that there exists a unity of style in German art "may well originate in the fact that, discovering everywhere identical reproductions of himself", the cultural philistine "infers from this identity of all 'cultivated' people the existence of a unity of style and thus the existence of a German culture".8 Nietzsche may have meant that the belief by most artists in Germany that a diversity of styles is the 5 Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche. Philosopher. Psychologist. Antichriit (Princeton: Princeton U., 1974), p. 134. 7 Nietzsche, Untimely, p. 9. 8 George A. Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 4. 16 basis around which a unity of style can be founded is by definition false.9 Taken as a whole, German cultural philistines may have expressed a variety of phenomena, but their works lacked a unity of style. In addition to believing that culture need not have a unity of style, Nietzsche held that the cultural philistine erred in contending that Germans already possessed a culture on top of which to build. Nietzsche stated: "there has filed past us a whole line of great heroic figures whose every movement... betrayed one thing: that they were seekers, and that they were seeking with such perseverance that which the cultural philistine fancied he already possessed: a genuine, original German culture".10 Nietzsche attacked German cultural philistines because they insisted that they were given a culture upon which to build, whereas he claimed that such a unified culture had not yet been created in Germany and will not ever be created if Germans continue to believe that they possess a unified culture. Nietzsche also attacked German cultural philistines because they were against works done by previous Germans which were considered too innovative. It was German cultural philistines who, with the "view of guaranteeing their own peace, took charge of history and sought to transform every science into a scientific discipline".11 9 Nietzsche, Untimely, p. 9. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., p. 10. 17 In saying this, he may have believed that previous German innovations in scholastic and in artistic disciplines were trivialized so as to not be threatening to the Germans who currently worked in these fields. He believed that serious disciplines were made trivial by his fellow countrymen: everyone during his time was permitted to reflect, research, aestheticize, to compose music, poetry, and paintings, and to create entire philosophies, as long as nothing innovative was produced. The German cultural philistine "invents for' his habits, modes of’ thinking, likes and dislikes, the general formula 'healthiness', and dismisses every uncomfortable disturber of the peace as being sick and neurotic".12 By this pronouncement, Nietzsche was possibly intimating that contemporary Germans did not honor the works of previous Germans which were not conclusive, profitable, or unchallenging because they thought that these types of works did not promote cultivatedness or learning. That German cultural philistines were not interested in beauty was confessed by them when Friedrich Vischer, a representative of them, was quoted by Nietzsche as saying that it is "weakness which enables us to transcend that longing for the beautiful experienced so profoundly by tragic souls".13 That German cultural philistines openly admitted that they did not seek the beauty which is the hallmark of art and that they were 12 Ibid., p. 12. 13 Ibid., p. 13. 18 weak was further proof to Nietzsche that they were inimical to the rise of culture in Germany. Using Strauss' book The Old Faith and the New as an example, Nietzsche claimed that contemporary art works were inferior because they were illogically constructed. Nietzsche professed that as a rule the first written draft sufficed to show whether a writer had envisioned his work as a unified entity and found the general tempo and correct proportion to what he had envisaged, which are signs of great writing. The opposite of this would be to put together a book out of bits and pieces and trust that they cohere themselves: this is to confuse logical with artistic cohesion, which is the way of mediocre scholars. In any event, he declared that the relation between the four major questions which labeled the division of Strauss' work was not logical: a guiding question by which the divisions can be related does not exist. First, the natural scientist, who poses Strauss third question of "How one conceives the world", demonstrates the purity of his sense for the truth precisely in that he passes by the fourth question of "Do we still possess religion" in silence. Secondly, there is no connection between these two questions and the other two of Strauss', or among the other two, which are "How do we order our life" and "Are we still Christians". Nietzsche believed that the overall plan of Strauss' work was also flawed because Strauss was unable to distinguish between faith and knowledge by confusing his "new faith" with the 19 findings of contemporary science. In the first place, only a minute portion of Strauss' book treated of that which Strauss could have a right to call faith, but with artificiality. Further, Strauss pledged in the beginning of his book to examine whether or not his new faith in science was capable of doing for the adherent what the old faith in Christianity did for the believer, but in the end he himself came to think he had promised too muCh. That Strauss' book did not even appear to hang together logically, and that Strauss himself seems to have believed that it was as such, shows to Nietzsche that Strauss was not a great writer. In addition to his inability to construct a book with unity, Nietzsche thought that Strauss was not a great writer insofar as he merely appeared to follow the example of other great writers. According to Nietzsche, philistines believed that great writers come into being through instruction or by imitation alone. "What Strauss wants to do", Nietzsche noted, "is betrayed most clearly in his emphatic and not wholly innocent recommendation of a Voltairean gracefulness in the service of which he could have learned those 'lightly clad' arts of which his panegyrist speaks-- supposing, that is, that virtue can be taught and a pedant can ever become a dancer".14 Whereas Strauss believed that great writing can be taught, Nietzsche held that one is born with the ability to write 14 Ibid., p. 44. 20 well. Strauss believed that he was like Voltaire in that he was an elaborator of others' researches, which he illuminated from all sides, thereby satisfying the demands of thoroughness. Yet, Strauss' book only appears thorough: in reality, it only touches upon subjects and pursues none at length, in contrast to Voltaire's work. "As a writer", Nietzsche quoted Strauss, " I refuse to be a philistine... I want to be...the German Voltaire! and best of all the French Lessing too!" To which Nietzsche responded, "he [(Strauss)] had no character whatever: whenever he wanted a character he always had to assume one".15 That Strauss aspired to write like others was evidence to Nietzsche that Strauss lacked the originality necessary for writing great literature. For Nietzsche, it was originality and strength of character which distinguished great writers from poor ones. According to Nietzsche, Strauss' writing, like other writings found in contemporary German philistine culture, did not contain the unity and grammatical rigor required of great writing. For Nietzsche, the expressions "parliamentary oratory", "salon conversation", and "sermon", indicated that since there were different kinds of oratory used in Germany, public speech had not yet produced a national, unified style. In other words, there was no unified norm by which a German writer may be guided, and thus treated of German in his own way with the result 15 Ibid., p. 45. 21 of the endless dilapidation of the language, which hindered the growth of culture. Nietzsche stated that German linguistic arbiters asserted that German classics could no longer be valid as stylistic models since they used a large number of words, locutions, and syntactical figures which contemporaries had lost: to serve their contemporaries, a dictionary collecting the masterpieces of German's present literary celebrities for the purposes of imitating their phraseology and vocabulary had been published. For Nietzsche, German classics should be valued and studied instead of contemporary writings. It is extremely characteristic of the pseudo-culture of the philistine that he should appropriate the concept of the classic and the model writer-- he who exhibits his strength only in warding off a real, artistically vigorous cultural style and through steadfastness in warding off arrives at a homogeneity of expression which almost resembles a unity of style. By this remark, Nietzsche perhaps implied that the only way German philistine culture arrived at what seems to be a unified language was by shunning' German tclassics-- the closest writings Germany ever possessed in the way of a grammatical unity-- and by arbitrarily making contemporary grammatical misuses acceptable. For lNietzsche, it. was contemptible that contemporary Germans were reacting against the strenuous rules of classical German: this reaction was negative in nature and constituted a false productivity with regard to language. The reason that contemporary German philistines were capricious, corrupt 15 Ibid., p. 53. 22 and malicious toward classical German was as an act of revenge on the language for' the unbearable boredom it caused them. Nietzsche believed that they were bored by it because they were shallow. Nietzsche may have been professing that a language born out of laxness, boredom, and resentment was a language constructed out of weakness, and therefore only capable of giving rise to faulty writing; and such is the language being used by contemporary Germans. Nietzsche maintained that it was only through the coherent and correct use of the German language that German culture could express itself, a language he thought misused by Strauss and others like him. Nietzsche gives about seventy examples of the type of language in which Strauss' book was composed and subjects them to harsh criticism. The errors found include grammatical mistakes of various types, mixed up metaphors, impossible imagery, meaninglessness, and offenses against good usage.17 The critique supports the claim that Strauss had lost all feeling for classical German and any acute awareness of the meaning of the terms he employed. According to Nietzsche, the distorted, extravagant and threadbare syntax, and neologisms that Strauss used were regarded by present-day Germans as merits which gave his work piquancy. This kind of writing, however, was seen by Nietzsche as a corruption 17 Ronald Haymen, Friedrich Nietfiche (Harrisonburg: R. R. Donnelley and Sons, 1982), p. 161. 23 of the German language frequently employed by German newspapers and magazines.18 It is cdear that he believed that the correct employment of language was crucial to culture and that German philistine writers were hindering the rise of culture through their abuse of the German language. Nietzsche also held that the rise of culture was prevented by the cultural philistine's pretensions toward possessing knowledge, when. they in fact. only' possessed beliefs. For Nietzsche, knowledge was based on information about the world organized around a world view characteristic of a group of people. Beliefs were the views of individuals based on their own idiosyncracies. In The Old Faith and The New, Strauss liberal imperialist creed replaced the idea of a personal God and the Christian faith in all its varieties with a scientific materialism founded on an evolutionary cosmology. Nietzsche wrote that "the last thing the real thinker will wish to know is what kind of beliefs are agreeable to such natures as Strauss".19 He might have been insisting that culture does not arise from people's personal beliefs. He stated that as soon as scholars attempted to interest people in their beliefs rather than in their knowledge, they 'would be overstepping their bounds. For Nietzsche, Strauss was a cultural philistine because instead of offering Germans 18 Nietzsche, Untimely, p. 54-5. 19 Ibid., p. 14. 24 knowledge which might contribute to the rise of a culture, he gave them the beliefs around which a false religion-- that of Strauss' incorrect view of scientific materialism- -may be built. That Strauss had only beliefs to offer was seen by Nietzsche as a weakness since they would not have engendered what Nietzsche defined as a culture: they would have given the appearance of constituting a culture, in keeping with the facade Nietzsche thought other Germans were perpetrating. "Therefore deny it no longer: the founder of a religion has been unmasked, the new, pleasant and comfortable road to the Straussian paradise has been constructed". Nietzsche maintained that like the Germans who believed Germany possessed a genuine culture, the religion which Strauss advocated as part of that culture was a sham, constructed in order to justify the military might of Germany.20 The religion Strauss advocated was considered worthless by Nietzsche since it trivialized important subject matters, the previous, valuable knowledge gained in academic and philosophical pursuits, and the works of art created by genuine artists. In his book, Strauss stated that scholars were assisting Germans' understanding of the war of 1871 and were helping in the construction of the German state through historical studies which had been made simple for the unlearned by a series of attractive and 20 A. H. J. Knight, Some Aspects of the Life and Work of Nietzsche (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), p. 28. 25 popularly’ written. historical works. 1k) this statement Nietzsche responded: "what. can. he Ibe referring' to but newspaper-reading". He may have been exaggerating here, but his point is that serious matters like history should not be presented flippantly. When Strauss spoke of Germans' lively participation in the construction of the German state, Nietzsche stated that what Strauss meant by this was the Germans' daily visits to the public house. By his response, one can tell that Nietzsche was accusing Strauss of exaggerating the importance of the German people's role in state-building. Nietzsche believed that Strauss was trying to make small the one activity Nietzsche believed the Germans took too seriously: state-building through military means. For Strauss, the theaters and concerts were for Germans "stimuli for the imagination and sense of humour". To this statement, Nietzsche replied that Strauss wittily dignified this dubious behavior on the part of Germans. In making the above statements, Nietzsche may have thought that Strauss and other cultural philistines were not concerned with culture, but were concerned with the belittlement of culture. Nietzsche stated that the philistine type in all its purity is heard in that Strauss believed that art provides for "private little aesthetic closets consecrated to the great poets and composers in which the philistine ‘not :merely 'edifies' himself but in which, according to his confession, 'all his 26 blemishes are effaced and washed away'.21 Here, Nietzsche was possibly saying that it was not the purpose of art to make people feel better about themselves or to enlighten them--aspects which belittle art-- but to inspire people to improve themselves and their society. As well as believing that the purpose of art did not lie in its ability to instruct, Nietzsche also held that art was not engendered. through. optimistic Ibelief. Nietzsche wrote that Strauss' optimism came from his belief in scientific materialism. The optimism of Strauss made Strauss feel that he had the right to berate any philosophy which threatened his optimism, even ‘when he knew ‘very little about the philosophy he was condemning. Strauss censured Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy since it was not in agreement with his idea of a benevolent universe. Similarly, Strauss acknowledged Kant's ideas since he believed they were valuable as opposed to Schopenhauer's, but he did not realize how they were able to support his own ideas. Nonetheless, Strauss did not base his ideas on Kant's, but on Hegel's and Schleiermacher's. In addition, the optimism of Strauss was shown in that he made "it look as though refuting Schopenhauer was no bother at all. . . This [was]... achieved by showing that there [was] no need whatever to take a pessimist seriously: the vainest of sophistries will do for dealing with so 'unhealthy and unprofitable' a philosophy as Schopenhauer's". Nietzsche 21 Nietzsche, Untimely, p. 18. 27 may have believed that Strauss' optimism was not a well- founded philosophy since it did not argue seriously against an opposing philosophy, as every sound philosophy should. ‘Like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche viewed optimism not merely as an absurd but also as a "truly infamous mode of thinking", a bitter mockery of the nameless sufferings of humanity. Nietzsche was perhaps asserting that Strauss' optimism as a rule :made ‘matters too easy for itself. Nietzsche believed that Schopenhauer's insistence on the role pain and evil play in the world was much more valuable as a means of understanding life and as a means on which to base art.22 Nietzsche thought that philistines like Strauss also hindered the creation of genuine German art through the lack of courage to accept the impersonal nature ascribed to the universe by contemporary science. According to Nietzsche, Strauss placed his faith in old, benevolent conceptions of the universe.23 Strauss believed that while luck. would. be an irrational master' of the universe, necessity, the chain of causes in the world, was reason itself. Strauss' belief was for Nietzsche a surreptitious borrowing from the Hegelian belief of the real as the rational and the belief in success. In Nietzsche's opinion, the universe did not operate under any 22 Ibid., p. 28. 23 A. Wolf, The Philosophy of Nietzsche (London: Constable, 1915), pp.37-9. ‘l_ 28 moral imperative, but under impersonal laws, and Strauss' declaration that the universe, like a human being, was motivated to act through desire, was outmoded. Strauss went on to say that the universe was imperfect because God, like man, preferred continual striving towards perfection to peaceful possession of perfection. Nietzsche maintained that by saying this, Strauss himself would have to concede that our world is an arena, not of rationality but of error, and that its laws and purposefulness are no source of consolation, since they proceed from a God who is not merely in error but takes pleasure in error... But for whom is [Strauss' idea here intended?]... For the noble and contented "we" [(cultural philistines)], so as to preserve their contentment: perhaps they were overcome by fear in the midst of those merciless wheels of the universal machine and tremblingly begged their leader for help.24 In this passage, Nietzsche may have been trying to show that Strauss' conception of a benevolent universe was constructed out of a fear of facing the universe as present knowledge conceived it as being: the universe is indifferent toward humans. Nietzsche possibly believed that a true German art could not come into being if the ramifications of the results of modern science were not faced head on inasmuch as the current and most precise way of understanding the world-- that the universe is indifferent. towards its inhabitants--was not ‘taken into consideration in the formation of a people's worldview. He declared that for the philistine, the concept of an erring God was more attractive than that of the Christian, 24 Nietzsche, Untimely, pp. 32-3. 29 miracle-working one, since the philistine committed errors, but has never yet performed a miracle. This was precisely why the philistine loathed the genius: the genius had the deserved reputation of performing miracles. The philistine threatened the rise of the artistic genius, through whom culture is made possible, by committing the error of presenting the world as something Nietzsche's interpretation of current knowledge showed it could not be: thereby the philistine also threatened the engendering by this knowledge of a common worldview. As well as believing that a foundation for culture could not be. built upon old knowledge, Nietzsche also believed that the hurried. manner in which science was conducted in contemporary Germany could not but yield knowledge useless to artists. The scientific man has in recent years gotten into a frantic hurry in Germany, as though science were a factory... his study is no longer an occupation but a necessity, he... goes through all the business of life... with the half- consciousness or the repellent need for entertainment characteristic of the exhausted worker. Now this is his attitude toward culture too... Our scholars are [like]... farmers who want to increase the tiny property they have inherited [and are eluded by] the most important questions which would press upon them in a state of solitude,... that is to say precisely those questions as to Whither, Whence, and Why. 5 Perhaps Nietzsche believed that modern German science and scholarship were in the hands of people who performed their work not out of the possible significance that it may hold for civilization, but as a means of employment for their 25 Ibid., pp. 35-6. 30 livelihood. He insisted that research was conducted by people who did not seriously consider whether or not their work will be of any significant value to society. For him, a researcher exhausted by his inconsequential work will not have the strength to appreciate the fruits of a genuine culture, but will want instead to partake of the more easily assimilable products of philistine culture, namely entertainments. The fact that Strauss' book was so widely accepted by German academicians proved to Nietzsche that they were not in favor of supporting great works of art, but great works of entertainment. Not only was culture harmed by poor, philistine writers like Strauss, Nietzsche claimed that it was also abused by philistines who wished to hide the uninspiring content of their works of art through "beautiful form". Nietzsche remarked that under the assumption that the content of a work of art is normally judged by its form, the viewer is forced into an incorrect evaluation of the content of a work through its form. For Nietzsche, it appeared that modern people exasperated each other to such a great extent that they ultimately felt the necessity of making themselves understood through artifice. To this end, modern people borrowed from artists of the past, from the East as well as the West. The most celebrated artists for these moderns who wanted to be interesting were to be discovered among French people, the most terrible among Germans. Since the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, the 31 ancient and unique German characteristic for profound seriousness had fallen further out of favor than ever before because of Germany's attempt to add French elegance to German art works. German handicrafts, scholarship, drama, tragedy, philosophy, and music, and the German language and theater were made up of artifices for beautifying existence taken after French models. Nietzsche believed that whereas it was natural for the French to be elegant, it was not so for’ Germans, whose works look artificial when attempts were made to embellish them after the French manner. Contemporary Germans no longer possessed "that ancient German nature which, though hard, austere and full of resistance, is so as the most precious of materials." Nietzsche may have been saying that by imitating the French, contemporary Germans forsook the rough emotional character which was natural to them and was exhibited by cultural figures of their heritage. He thought that the tendency for beautiful form alone then current in Germany came not only from the recent adoption of French style, but also from Germans' desire for profit. One who lives among Germans is severely pained by their "feverish restlessness, their search for success and profit, their overestimation of the moment, [and] one is limitlessly indignant to think that all these maladies and weaknesses are on principle never to be cured but only painted over--with a 'culture of interesting form'l".26 25 Ibid., pp. 167-8. 32 Here, Nietzsche was possibly saying that people who promoted the creation of genius should have been angry at the fact that because Germans were too busy providing for material success, the only kind of culture Germans had time for was a superficial one. Nietzsche held that it was the Germans of his day who were afflicted more than other peoples by the contradiction between form and content detrimental to the growth of art and culture. He stated that form counted with the Germans as a convention, vestment and disguise. The convention contemporary Germans were following was the convention to go wherever their fancy might dictate, and to slovenly imitate the art of other peoples. He claimed that German artists copied foreign artists' works because German artists held that they were not known for having a sense for form, but a sense for content, which they were convinced of by the celebration of their profound subjectivity. The subjectivity of the Germans can be receptive to an exceptional degree... but as a whole it remains weak because all these beautiful threads are not wound together into a powerful not: so that the visible act is not the act and self-revelation of the totality of this subjectivity but only a feeble and crude attempt on the part of one or other of these threads to pose as being the whole.27 Nietzsche was perhaps suggesting that the "individuality" or "subjectivity" that a German expressed in his actions was not derived from a necessity which life had forced him 27 Ibid., p. 81. 33 to deal with and overcome, and that his "individuality" therefore was not a strong one since it had not been born out of a struggle. He was possibly setting down that the "subjective truths" or acts issuing forth from a German were not grounded in a framework which made them peculiarly German: the acts, by their disparity from other German acts merely seemed to be informed by the subjectivity which German's were thought to typify. In other words, the thoughts and feelings of Germans were not united by an idea expressed in the actions taken or works created by them. And how should the great productive spirit endure among a people no longer secure in a unified subjectivity and which falls asunder into the cultivated with a miseducated and misled subjectivity,... [and who know] that this [unified subjectivity] is falsified and retouched precisely among that part of the people which calls itself the cultured part. In this statement, Nietzsche may have been declaring that Germans had once possessed some unity of style or spirit, which he called subjectivity. To him, it appeared that contemporary German artists had lost the "unified subjectivity" that past Germans possessed, and had replaced it with an unconnected one, one that did not spring from what was uniquely central to German life, but which was imitative of other nations. Nietzsche claimed that modern artists banned art and culture by aiding people to evade reality and to hide in form. Nietzsche stated that the art of modern man evaded the reality of the feelings which ruled over man by 23 Ibid., p. 32. A 34 exhibiting an excess of form that tried to hide the lack of content, or feeling, possessed by it. Modern people were not capable of seeing reality because their art did not educate them in recognizing the needs their emotions asked their actions to fulfil for them. Modern artists were not capable of discerning the needs of man since they had lost the depth of feeling necessary for this kind of discernment by imitating the styles of works of art from the past. By imitating the art forms of the past, Nietzsche held that modern artists were not at the same time able to evoke the feeling with which the artists they were mimicking brought to their work, and were keeping their own emotions from surfacing. Further, modern artists denied the power of emotions, which were best able to apprehend reality, by having as their objective only to give pleasure to and entertain their audience.29 * * 'k This section shows that Nietzsche argued that culture is founded on the recognition of the common needs of a community through an examination of its emotions. Using Richard Wagner as an example, Nietzsche asserted that such an examination could be undertaken through art and could lead to the discovery of a new, communal worldview. The expression by art of a new meaning for nature should be unified around an all-encompassing worldview that is supposed to inspire people to action, especially to the 29 Ibid., pp. 216-7. 35 reform of society. Through a cultivation of people's feelings, art helps people discover their essential needs so as to be able to satisfy them, and thereby improve the quality of their life. Art should seek to engender the creation of a people united by common needs and goals, a folk, a nation. Wagner attempted to create such a folk during his middle years. For Nietzsche, it was the expression of what is universal and enduring-- such as feelings which inspire action-- in the life of a people which constituted culture in general. Nietzsche believed that artists came into being through the loyalty of their nobler self to their instinctual self-- the nobler self directing the drives of the instinctual self. Since the art necessary for culture is produced by great artists for a folk, this section begins with a brief discussion of what Nietzsche may have meant by great artists and a folk. Nietzsche averred that if art was to contribute to culture and create a folk, it needed to be performed by great individuals and appreciated by great spectators. He wrote that for an event to be great, there must occur greatness in the people who bring it into being and greatness in the people who acknowledge it. The deed of a person lacks greatness if it is without a great after- effect, since this person had to have been mistaken as to its necessity at exactly the time it was performed. According to Nietzsche, the laying of the foundation stone of the festival theatre at Bayreuth in 22 May 1872-- a 36 project conceived of by Richard Wagner-- constituted a great event because it was accomplished by a great artist at a time when he had an audience (slight as it was) capable of appreciating his work. The festival theatre at Bayreuth and Wagner's art was a revolution in culture which Wagner had worked for all his life, a revolution which was recognized by a small audience sympathetic to Wagner and loathed by cultural philistines, who were in the majority at that time in Germany. What Wagner beheld within him on that day, however--how he became what he is and what he will be-- we who are closest to him can to a certain extent also see: and it is only from this Wagnerian inner view that we shall be able to understand his great deed itself-- and with this understanding guarantee its fruitfulness.30 Nietzsche was perhaps claiming that a great cultural event was one whose effect must be appreciated by spectators in a manner similar to the appreciation of it by its executor. With such an appreciation a great event is possible of being the cause of other great occasions or at least in its continuing to be remembered as a great event in itself. In fact, Wagner attempted to create a following which could appreciate his art, a folk. That Wagner was to become a great dramatist, Nietzsche laid down, was a gradual process which began through a critique of modern art and a wish for the creation of a "folk". When Wagner first realized that the greatest inspiration of all the arts could be expressed 30 Ibid., p. 199. 37 through the theater, this realization caused him to crave for fame and power. Wagner thought he could become a great, famous and powerful artist by mastering the ability to manipulate the emotions of people through grand opera. But when Wagner became aware that artists were creating grand operas so as to profit from them monetarily, he became a critic of grand opera and sought to purify it. Wagner felt that to manipulate people's emotions was not enough: one must also serve a noble goal, which Wagner took as the development of the spiritual needs of the nation. Modern art is a luxury... Just as it has employed its powers over the powerless, over the folk,... so as to render them ever more serviceable... and to create out of them the modern 'worker', so it has deprived the folk of the greatest and purest things its profoundest needs moved it to produce... --its mythology, its song, its dance, its linguistic inventiveness. Nietzsche may have been observing that in Wagner's middle period, Wagner believed that the resurrection of a folk or a nation was what the purpose of art should be, since it was only through a community of people that great art is founded and thrives. Wagner believed that a German folk could be engendered through elements which they understood, namely myth and music. Nietzsche stated that Wagner saw that both German myth and music were in a state of decay, myth having degenerated into the fairy tale, and music lacking support by not being economically profitable. Wagner wanted to "restore to myth its manliness, and to take the spell from music and bring it to speech", so that 31 Ibid., pp. 167-8. 38 he may find "the many" that desire like him "to become a folk". Nietzsche might have been claiming that Wagner wanted to use myth and music to regenerate a sense of German community. But, Wagner's aim was not understood by the public. Instead, the public looked upon his works as ends in themselves. Nietzsche believed that Wagner sought to preserve his art so that it might at some later date engender a German culture through its simplified emotional means of expression. Wagner sought to assist in this preservation through his prose writings. So that his goal could be understood by his contemporaries, Wagner had to communicate with them in a manner alien to his artistic nature: he wrote essays on his aim rather than letting his art works communicate it for him. Wagner's essay's "are attempts to transform his instinct into knowledge", whereby "he hopes the reverse process will take place in the souls of his readers".32 Nietzsche was possibly saying that Wagner's writings attempted to do indirectly what his art attempted to do directly, namely, to communicate to his audience his feelings directly through art rather than indirectly through intellectual demonstration. Nietzsche stated that it was as though Wagner was speaking to his enemies in his written discourse, and was trying to convert them to an appreciation of great art. For all his wishes to communicate to his contemporaries soberly, Wagner's 32 Ibid., p. 238. 39 passionate engagement occasionally came through in his essays. For if there is anything which sets [Wagner's] art apart from all other art of modern times is this: it no longer speaks the language of a culture of a caste and in general no longer recognizes any distinction between the cultivated and the uncultivated. It therewith sets Rzizigsairice.o§f051tion to the entire culture of the Nietzsche may have been saying that the basis of culture should not be based on its being understood by a small group of people, but by all people of a nation. Great art like Wagner's is an art which can be understood on an emotional level by all people of a society. Wagner's art, which seeks to communicate emotionally and is an instinctual way of comprehending existence, will not be understood until it is understood on its own terms and not through intellectual means. Wagner's art was not understood emotionally because the major way of approaching the world in his time was founded on an intellectual basis. But, Nietzsche proclaimed that Wagner seemed to indicate that he believed that Germans and people of other nations of the time had the capability of giving birth to a culture some time in the future. Wagner's conceptions were "like those of every great and good German, supra-German, and his art speaks, not to nations, but to individual men. But to men of the future... who feel a need in common and want to be redeemed from it through an act in common". Nietzsche may have been asserting that every great artist seeks to 33 Ibid., p. 249. 4O discover what is universal and enduring in life, and to communicate this discovery to everybody in hopes of generating a common culture among as many people as possible. Since Nietzsche believed that the creation of a folk by great artists is the basis for culture, it is important to consider how he believed great artists come into being. Nietzsche argued that great artists come into being through the loyalty of their noble self to their instinctual self. Nietzsche maintained that in Wagner's art, there are two minor elements connected by and subsumed under one major element. One minor element of Wagner's character which is exhibited by his art is the advancing streak of ardent, subterranean will that strives to the surface and wishes action to be taken within the world by Wagner himself. Nietzsche stated that a striving will aware of continual failure to make itself felt in the world can embitter a person and thus make him annoyed and unfair. But a spirit entirely pure, free, and full of love could lead this non-directed will on a course of moral ennoblement and action within the world. It is this spirit of moral ennoblement which is the second minor necessary element of Wagner's art. The major element in Wagner's art is loyalty. Loyalty is the most personal primal event that Wagner experiences within himself...--that marvelous experience and recognition that one sphere of his being remains loyal to the other, shows loyalty out of free and most selfless love, the creative, innocent, more illuminated sphere to the dark, intractable and 41 tyrannical.34 Nietzsche might have been saying that it is loyalty based on love that allows an artist, here in the shape of Wagner, to be great or genuinely creative by inspiring him channel his blind, impulsive will towards some moral end, action, or work. Without the loyalty of their noble goal to their impulsive will, Nietzsche considered that great artists like Wagner might never discover a single idea on which to base all of their work and become self-actualized. Nietzsche claimed that Wagner was uncertain as to whether or not he could bind all of his separate drives together into a unified whole. Wagner also faced the decision of whether or not to strive for power, notoriety, pleasure, or work. Nietzsche stated that the desire of power and honor by artists is praiseworthy only if it is not a desire motivated by self-seeking contentment, but a desire motivated by the important work one wants to offer others. Artists like Wagner must remain loyal to their major goal if they are not to fall into a state of inactivity by the frivolous attitude toward art-- in particular, for Wagner, theatre art-- held by their contemporaries. Nietzsche contended that the greatness of artists is based on their ability to base all of their work around one major idea, as can be seen in the work of Wagner. In the case of an artist of extraordinary ability, that artist's existence 34 Ibid., p. 203. 42 becomes an expression of their nature, an expression of their intellectual and emotional concerns. In wagner, it was drama that became his ruling passion and put an end to the nervous restlessness with which he approached art during his youth.35 "The artist especially, in whom the power of imitation is particularly strong, must fall prey to the feeble many-sidedness of modern life as to a serious childhood illness".36 Nietzsche may have been arguing that for art to be great, it must be founded around one basic conviction and not, as most modern art is, around many weaker beliefs. In addition to the loyalty Wagner had toward his art, Nietzsche pointed out that Wagner's ability to employ knowledge so as to express views central to his thought is an ability essential for great artists. The rejuvenator of the simple drama, the discoverer of the place of the arts in a true human society, the poet elucidator aesthetician and critic, the master of language, the mythologist and mytho-poet who for the first time enclosed the whole glorious, primeval structure within a ring and carved upon it the runes of his spirit-- what an abundance of knowledge Wagner had to assemble and encompass to be able to become all that! And yet the weight of it as a whole did not stifle his will to action, nor did the attractions of its individual aspects entice him aside.37 Nietzsche was perhaps suggesting that to create great art, Wagner not only had to learn a lot by studying, he also had 35 Ronald Taylor, Richard Wagner: Hi; Life. Art and Thought (London: P. Elek, 1979), p. 29. 36 Nietzsche, Untimely, p. 201. 37 Ibid., p. 205. 43 to contribute his own ideas to the various fields of learning he studied. Moreover, the knowledge Wagner had mastered and added to was culturally valuable because it was unified by views central to Wagner's thought. Nietzsche held that a great artist like Wagner should not allow himself to be a servant of history, the sciences, and philosophy, but should use these sources of knowledge as the basis around which to create his art. For example, a great artist takes a single historical occasion and characterizes it, unlike the historian, as an event that represents an entire era. And will the Meistepsinger not speak of the German nature to all future ages-- more, will it not constitute one of the ripest fruits of that nature, which always seeks reformation not revolution, and though broadly content with itself has not forgotten the noblest expression of discontent, the innovative deed.38 Nietzsche may have been saying that great artists like Wagner use a historical event as a means of representing a time period, and even the character of a people, through a common worldview: in this case, Germans are reformers and not revolutionaries. Nietzsche also believed that great artists need to have the ability to express feelings through their work. Nietzsche declared that Wagner felt that Der Ring had to be presented accurately, and deserved to be presented as such, because the poetic element in it is representative of all great art, namely, the expression of feelings and not 38 Ibid., p. 206. 44 ideas. For Nietzsche, great art was expressed poetically by the feelings evoked through a succession of actions. Now, if the gods and heroes of such mythological dramas as Wagner writes are to communicate also in words, there is no greater danger that this spoken language will awaken the theoretical man in us... That is why Wagner has forced language back to a primordial state in which it hardly yet thinks in concepts and in which it is itself still poetry, image, and feeling.39 Nietzsche may have been claiming that great art like Wagner's does not express itself through a clear statement of ideas using words as a scholar does, but through the use of words to express emotions as a poet does. In other words, great art requires a language which expresses life concretely so that its audience can understand it empathetically. like all great art, Wagner's later works possess a language and poetry unique to each work, in which an internal emotional drama is presented externally in a way which best expresses it. Because Wagner was a great poet, his works were not meant to be read, but to be sung. Nietzsche declared that poetry can best communicate itself by being sung or read out loud, since its effect is best felt sensually. Nietzsche contended that Wagner recognized that spoken drama suffered from having to explain itself rhetorically. So that drama would not have to rely on rhetoric for expression, Wagner used language economically and forcefully, and only for the expression of feeling. So as to allow the viewers of his operas to experience them directly, without the intrusion of explanation, Wagner used 39 Ibid., p. 237. 45 music to express the basic motivations of the characters of his dramas, used gestures for the expression of the first concrete sign. of ‘these 'motivations, and used ‘words to convey a weaker indication of them transformed into a more awakened act of volition. As well as using words to express emotions concretely, Nietzsche stated that Wagner is a great artist because he expresses nature through music authentically, clearly, and passionately. Wagner was able to forgo all the ways in which authors of the spoken drama utilized to give the actions of their work feeling since every action in his dramas is expressed emotionally by music. Not only does music allow for a simpler use of language within operas, but also for a subtler use of gesture. Nietzsche insisted that Wagner's music is great art because it animates nature in general, whether it is living or dead. Nietzsche advanced that before Wagner, music pertained to the permanent states of humanity, which the Hellenes named ethos, and that it was only with Beethoven that it started to apply to the passions occurring within people. Before Beethoven, the aim of musicians was to express a mood through sound by uniformity in form. In Beethoven's earlier' works, dramatically' passionate action. wanted. to show itself through music in a new way, but the old method of the music of moods was the only form that would be recognized by the musical world. Beethoven's later works evoked passion musically by placing together in relation to 46 one another several musical movements each of which represents a distinct mood. But because musicians after Beethoven failed to see that in his music moods were linked together to create a feeling of passion, music after him became muddled in character. Nietzsche wrote: That is why Wagner's struggle was to find every means of proclaiming clarity; to this end... his music is never indefinite, indicating only a general mood; everything that speaks through it, man or nature, has a strictly individualized passion: storm and fire take on the compelling force of a personal will. Nietzsche may have been saying that Wagner restored to the art of music the progress it had made through Beethoven from expressing moods to communicating passions, feelings deeper in nature than moods. In addition, Wagner gave every element in nature a distinctiveness of its own. To the uniqueness of individual elements of nature, the passionate distinctiveness of them gives audiences the feeling that they are experiencing not an opera, but real life itself. An artist needs to be able to express passion and emotion through his work so that an examination of these expressions might lead to the recognition of the common needs of a people. Nietzsche insisted that the common needs of a nation can only be discovered if the language artists employ is, like the language Wagner employs, founded on feeling. wagner showed us that the expression of feelings that language was originally based on has been 40 Ibid., p. 242. 4'7 nearly all lost since language has become almost exclusively developed so as to facilitate the communication of ideas. A possible reason why Wagner and Nietzsche believed language should be used to express feelings was because emotions show one what the basic requirements of life are so that an attempt at satisfying these needs may begin. Nietzsche's study of art is based on the belief that what makes a human activity valuable is the extent to which it makes people better capable of living in a setting with other people. This belief, which is the central idea that can be reconstructed from his essay's discussed in this paper, is similar to an idea Nietzsche formulates later in his life called the will-to-power. His idea of the will-to-power may be defined as the desire of any organism to make itself as powerful and as capable of action as it is able to.41 To become powerful, people must fulfil their needs. Nietzsche's essay on Wagner implies that the recognition of one's needs through one's emotions is the first step to the fulfillment of these needs, by which one becomes powerful. As soon as men seek to come to an understanding with one another, and to unite for a common work, they are seized with the madness of universal concepts,... and everything they do... does not correspond to their real needs but only to the hollowness of those tyrannical... concepts:... that is to say from a mutual agreement as to words and actions without a mutual agreement as to feelings.4 41 Bernd.‘Magnus, Nietzsche's Existential Imperative (Bloomingdale: Indiana U., 1978), pp. 21-4. 42 Nietzsche, Untimely, p. 215. 48 Nietzsche may have meant that the basis for the ideas of how a people might satisfy its needs should spring from the insight given to a people as to its needs through an examination of its feelings. In other words, the development of concepts relating to action have no value if there is no necessity as to why one should act. Nietzsche stated that it is the purpose of art to educate people in the language of feeling so that they might better be able to assess their needs. Through great artists like Wagner, art "reaches out to its corresponding necessary shape in the world of the visible... [and] becomes judge over the whole visible world of the present [and] wants to create for itself a body, that it seeks its path through all of you to visibility in movement, deed, structure and morality!"43 Nietzsche was possibly claiming that true artists are able to discover what the needs of their people are by an examination of their people's feelings. Having their needs made conscious to them by their artists, a people can then attempt to fulfil these needs. Nietzsche believed that art aids a people in fulfilling the needs they have to satisfy in order to have culture: art inspires the reformation of society around a unified worldview. Nietzsche believed that art has not inspired reform since the Golden Age of Greece because Alexander the Great spread Greek culture throughout the world without a view towards keeping it unified. Using 43 Ibid., pp. 216-7. 49 Wagner's art and theater as examples, Nietzsche noted that art can contribute to culture by inspiring the reform of societal institutions around a unified worldview. Wagner is capable of giving art an inspirational quality, since he "is master of the arts, the religions, the histories of various nations... [and] he is one who unites what he has brought together into a living structure, a simplifier of the world".44 Nietzsche was possibly arguing that an artist, using Wagner as a model, is a person who ties together and simplifies the various elements of human culture into a work representative of life, and thereby inspirational in nature. The comprehensiveness and simplicity found in great art like that of Wagner's would cause innovations everywhere in society because it would show by contrast the vacuousness of the relationship between contemporary art and society. Wagner, his sponsors, and even his spectators revived the duty which art held in ancient Greece as an inspirational force in life, as can be seen at Bayreuth. At Bayreuth, the participants of the theatre festival were dedicated wholly to not only the success of the festival, but also to the deeds which the festival was meant to inspire after its termination. Nietzsche argued that art inspires people to make a contribution to society by motivating them to commit to an idea or to a goal which would improve the life of their 44 Ibid., p. 207. 50 fellowman. In addition to reforming the theater, Nietzsche believed that art should inspire reform of present-day educational and governmental institutions. He stated that the fact that contemporary German's enmity and malice was incapable of destroying Wagner or of hindering his work teaches us one more thing: it betrays that they are weak and that the resistance of the former rulers will no longer be able to withstand many more'attacks... the time has come for those who want conquest and victory. Nietzsche may have been saying that cultural philistines wanted to prevent the construction of Wagner's festival theater at Bayreuth. However, the founding of the festival theater at Bayreuth makes clear that institutional reform within Germany' was possible: the people in. power ‘were incapable of preventing Wagner's theater from coming into being. The significance of the festival theater at Bayreuth and art for culture came from their ability to refresh a person and thereby render him capable of greater action, and from their ability to inspire action-oriented goals in all aspects of life by motivating a person to sacrifice himself to such goals. Nietzsche declared that art, through a simplification of the actual problems people face in life, allows people to identify with the hero it depicts. An identification with a hero inspires people to overcome the problems they encounter in their efforts to improve the life of their fellowman. Nietzsche noted: "The greatest causes of suffering there are for the individual-- 45 Ibid., p. 211. 51 that men do not share all knowledge in common, that ultimate insight can never be certain, that abilities are divided unequally-- ... puts him in the need of art".46 He was perhaps claiming that the psychic pain that people in pursuit of improving the lot of their fellowman undergo is eased through art. The lessening of the psychic pain of the former people makes it easier for them to improve life to any extent that they are able. "The individual must be consecrated to something higher than himself-- that is the meaning of tragedy", and the joy that comes from this consecration is a joy that "is altogether universal and suprapersonal, the rejoicing of mankind at the guarantee of the unity and continuance of the human as such".47 Nietzsche was possibly claiming that the importance of art lies in its ability to inspire the pursuit of a goal which is for the benefit of one's fellowman. For Nietzsche, the bringing into being of a genius, whether he is an artist or a philosopher, is justified because a genius' creations bring about an improvement of life for his people. 45 Ibid., p. 212. 47 Ibid., p. 213. II. Philosophers, Philosophy and Culture The first part of chapter two will endeavor to show that Nietzsche believed that modern educational institutions were incapable of engendering great philosophers because they stressed. mass education over individualized education. Great philosophers are people whose philosophies provide a foundation upon which knowledge can be organized" INietzsche :maintained. that businessmen and the state, through their sacrifice of individualized education for the employability factor offered by mass education, hinder the creation of the philosophical genius. Nietzsche submitted that educators of philosophers who aid their pupils to discover and develop their strengths were rare in Germany because education was not directed toward this end. He believed that an individual who aspires to become a great philosopher must have the ability to use his lesser talents around the strength of his greatest talent. Such an individual will be unable to reach his full potential unless he combines the two educational maxims which contemporary Germans have separated. One of the maxims teaches that the educator should speedily perceive the actual strength of his student and then direct all his efforts at it so as to aid that one 52 53 virtue to reach true maturity. The other norm demands that the educator should feed all the powers which exist in his student and bring them to a harmonious relationship with one another. Nietzsche claimed that educators capable of nourishing their pupil's central strength along with their pupil's weaker powers were rare in the Germany of his time. Even the much admired way in which our men of learning set about their scientific pursuits reveals above all that they are thinking more of science than of mankind... If [science] is not directed... by a higher maxim of education, but... allowed to run wilder and wilder on the {principle of 'the more the better', traffic with science is certainly as harmful to men of learning as the economic principle of laissez faire is to the morality of whole nations... If it is at once obvious why an orator or a writer cannot now be educated in these arts-- because there are no educators for them-- ... where are ‘we... to find. the moral exemplars and models among our contemporaries. He may have been arguing that the emphasis in Germany on mass education rather than on quality education is incapable of nurturing within students that which they are best at and is immoral. The reason there was no drive to inspire students of philosophy to discover and strive to fulfil what they are good at, which Nietzsche would call being virtuous or moral, was because modern man oscillated between believing in the moral systems of Christianity and those of antiquity. Modern man lived at times with an imitative Christian morality and at other times with a timid revival of antiquity: with. the fear of ‘what is natural inherited from Christianity and the renewed attraction of this naturalness from antiquity. Nietzsche 1 Nietzsche, Untimely, pp. 131-2. 54 claimed that good educators were needed so that students of philosophy did not restlessly waver back and forth between the ideals of antiquity and Christianity, but stood instead firmly on a ground capable of supporting the taking of action by them. Nietzsche seemed to believe that good educators of philosophers were rare in Germany because education served the state and business people, not philosophy. Two of the ways Nietzsche believed modern education to be misemployed was through the greed of businessmen and the state. He contended. that Greedy businessmen, who needed the help of education in return, commanded education's aims. The avarice of "money-makers" was seen through their desire to educate people in using the degree of learning of which they were capable for employment and for the accumulation of the largest possible amount of profit. The man of business harmed culture by maintaining that there existed a positive correlation between property and intelligence, and that this correlation was a moral necessity. But, Nietzsche noted that the kind of education that benefits culture is one which proposes ends that go beyond making money, like the creation of the philosophical genius. In addition to the greed of businessmen, education was also misemployed by the greed of the state, which wanted the largest possible dissemination and standardization of education so that the state's citizens could be used for its battles against other states. In 55 other words, the 'cultural state' attempted to educate its people for its own benefit. He held that the education of people so that they may be used by the state is a fettering of education and. culture, as the case of Christianity shows. Christianity was one of the purest manifestations of the impetus to education and culture; but since it has been used in countless ways to further the might of the state it has become hypocritical and dishonest, and has deteriorated into a contradiction of its original aim. Nietzsche believed that one of the main reasons that the striving to greatness in philosophy was not recognized by businesspeople and the state of modern times was due to the educational institutions of the time. It was because institutions of learning teach future scholars, artists, businesspeople, and civil servants to promote solely their own interests through education that the conditions for the production of the philosophical genius did not improve in the modern era. Nietzsche asserted that the idea of basing culture on a common worldview should be the organizing principle of future educational institutions: these institutions should have as their goal the production of philosophers who discover afresh the significance of life as a whole, and not the promotion of the civil servant, businessman, scholar, or cultural philistine. It will be difficult to replace the basic idea behind the current educational system, which has as its goal the production of the scholar, because it has its 56 roots in medieval times. He claimed that the people who might be used to give education a metaphysical grounding-- a basis which considers the meaning of life, a basis on which to formulate a worldview--were diverted from this path by the modern educational system, which works at their self-seeking impulses. Instead of helping to give rise to great philosophers, modern educational institutions offered people a chance to work for their baser instincts, for material rewards and a modest and secure place in society, instead of for the production of philosophical genius within themselves.2 According to Nietzsche, the general lack of freedom a philosopher-employee was given to pursue the truth, the manner in which philosophers are selected, and the way they are expected to teach at educational institutions further threatened the birth of philosophical people. Two concessions to the state made on the part of philosophers were that the state was given authority with regard to the quality of the philosophers it selects for academia, and that the proposition was made that there must always be a good supply of well qualified philosophers to fill all of academia's needs. Another way public educational systems harmed philosophy was by obliging philosophers to educate, at certain fixed hours, every academic youth who wanted instruction. Nietzsche believed that academia was taking away the philosopher's freedom to work on his ideas 2 Ibid., p. 176. 57 whenever he cared to by requiring him to think in public about predetermined topics at predetermined times. The fourth restriction that the state placed on academic philosophers occurred with the demand that the philosopher need not be a thinker, but at most a learned lecturer of other's ideas. Using contemporary Germany as a typical example of the rise of the nation-state that occurred in the modern world, Nietzsche believed that these states institutionalized philosophy so that it did not rule over life as it was supposed to, but is instead under the rule of the state. He claimed that after using Hegelian philosophy to sanction the German state, and after acquiring the power through unification to no longer need the sanction of Hegelian philosophy, the German state no longer had need of philosophers and only appeared to support them. it * it Through the discernment of a nation's necessities through art and experience, Nietzsche believed that philosophers had the responsibility of finding for their people a common worldview, a metaphysical meaning for life, to which their people could relate their activities and find meaning. This section of chapter two will try to discern the ways that Nietzsche, using Schopenhauer as an example, thought genuine philosophers could be brought into being and contribute to culture. Nietzsche believed that culture was based on the great ideas and works of 58 individual philosophers. Thus, he placed great emphasis on the education of individuals. For an individual to be properly educated, an educator is required who is able to help students develop their unique, greatest talent, around which they can employ their lesser talents. A genuine philosopher is capable of educating individuals properly if his philosophy or worldview gives a unified picture of existence by which an individual can learn how his own existence is significant. Nietzsche held that the foundation for culture consisted in giving life significance by discovering and developing that which is unique in oneself. To discover one's uniqueness, one must criticize and disown, as Schopenhauer did, all that is transitory in oneself, which one has received from their surroundings, and develop that which is "imperishable", or unique, in oneself. In developing that which is unique in oneself, one hopes to come to an understanding of life in general, which is how the individual genius contributes to culture. An understanding of existence as a whole is the worldview a people need to build a culture upon. Finally, the only place a genuine philosopher can come into being is in an environment where he is not tied by obligations to anything except the search for a philosophy by which knowledge and life should be reordered. Nietzsche wrote that one manner in which an individual can discover his true and unique nature and become a philosopher is by developing that which is unique 59 in himself. Every man knows that he will be in the world only once and that nature will never again gather into a unity so uniquely variegated an arrangement as he is, but he hides this knowledge behind customs, opinions, conventions. Philosophers loathe this promenading about in borrowed styles and appropriated views. They also reveal everyone's hidden bad conscience by exhibiting that every person is capable of transforming theirself into something unique. Nietzsche praised people who believed that they were not participants of his uncultured era because he thought they would awaken their era to life and would themselves live on with the knowledge that self- actualization is possible. He claimed that the fact that people are alive at all should be the most powerful incentive for them to exist according to their own norms and laws. There is present in the world, he insisted, a single course along which no person can be led through but by himself. To discover this path one must ask one's self what it is that one has really loved hitherto in one's life. By comparing what you have loved in your life up to the present, you may be able to apprehend how what you love has made up a goal which you have striven to reach so as to become who you presently are. For Nietzsche, people's true natures do not lie hidden deep within themselves, but very high above themselves, or at least above that which they normally take to be themselves. He believed that one's educators reveal to one what one's 60 unique gifts are, something in themselves very hard to access. Your educators can only be your liberators. And this is the secret of all culture: it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacles... Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds... that want to attack the tender buds of the plant. .. it is the perfecting of nature when it deflects her cruel and merciless assaults and turns them to good. Nietzsche may have been claiming that a philosopher's educators help remove what is commonplace in their students so that their students may be better able to discern what is in them to be perfected. In other words, a philosopher's educators can help a student find his true nature, which is the refining of one's passions and their expression through works and actions. Nietzsche asserted that a philosopher's educators should bring about a basis for educating students through the advocation of honesty, cheerfulness, and steadfastness.4 Schopenhauer taught Nietzsche that education begins with these three qualities. Schopenhauer's work is honest because it does not contain within it any paradoxes. Nietzsche took paradoxes to be statements which carried no conviction since writers who employed them were not actually convinced by them and created them only so as to decorate their work. Schopenhauer's discourse is an honest, calm, good-natured 3 Ibid., p. 130. 4 Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau, Wagner and Nietzsche (New York: Seabury, 1976), p. 109. 61 discourse before a listener who listens to it with fondness. Schopenhauer's powerful sense of well being, which Nietzsche called cheerfulness, is an element, like honesty, also required of educators. Schopenhauer's cheerfulness embraced his audience immediately when he started to speak: there was a kind of faultless unaffectedness and naturalness such as was possessed by people who were masters of themselves. Schopenhauer understood "how to express the profound with simplicity, the moving without rhetoric, the scientific without pedantry: and from what German could he have learned this."5 Nietzsche was possibly saying that Schopenhauer's writing is honest and cheerful because it is uniquely his own. moreover, Nietzsche wrote that a great thinker like Schopenhauer always cheers and refreshes, whether he is expressing his human insight or divine restraint, without peevish gesturing but with certainty, simplicity, and courage, perhaps a little harshly but always as a winner. Finally, Schopenhauer was an excellent philosopher not only because he was honest and cheerful, but also because he was steadfast. A great philosopher "finds his way every time before we have so much as noticed that he has been seeking it; as though compelled by a law of gravity he runs on ahead, so firm and agile, so inevitably".6 Nietzsche might have been advancing that great philosophers are steadfast 5 Nietzsche, Untimely, p. 134. 5 Ibid., p. 135. 62 because they must be in order to remain keen enough to carry out their task. Nietzsche held that honesty, cheerfulness, and steadfastness are not the only qualities required of philosophers, philosophers should also educate by the manner in which they live their lives. I profit from a philosopher only insofar as he can be an example... But this example must be supplied by his outward life and not merely in his books... How completely this outward philosophical life is lacking in Germany: where the body is only just beginning to liberate itself long after the spirit seems to have been liberated. What he was perhaps declaring here is that for a nation to possess a culture, not only are the works of philosophers needed, but so too is the necessity of philosophers practicing what they express among the public at large. He believed that the philosopher in Germany has to learn how to serve the public as a moral example: it is in this way that Schopenhauer the human being can be used as an example. Nietzsche maintained that in addition to Schopenhauer, the mightiest example of a bold and honest philosopher-artist modern Germans have before them is Richard Wagner, who exhibits how the genius must not be afraid to enter into the most antagonistic relationship with existing forms of expression if he wishes to engender the higher order that lives within tfimn Wagner did not care for the ways in which operas were being composed during his time so he formulated a theory of drama which he 7 Ibid., pp. 136-7. 63 thought would improve the writing of operas. Nietzsche added that Holderlin and Kleist were ruined by their uniqueness and could not bear the atmosphere of so-called German culture; only very strong people, like Goethe, Schopenhauer, Beethoven, and Wagner were able to endure such a cold climate. What Schopenhauer learned from the example that Goethe provided was that if Schopenhauer was to save his philosophy from dying, he had to defend it against the indifference of his fellowman. Since Schopenhauer was afraid that his philosophy would perish from non-recognition, he often failed to build solid and sympathetic friendships: he was a total solitary. Wherever there has been oppression of any kind, there the solitary thinker has been loathed since his philosophy offers him an asylum into which no oppression can force its way. Nietzsche believed that solitaries like Schopenhauer and other philosophical geniuses should make their views against an oppressive society known and should act as moral examples since every action by them which is not clearly an objection against their oppressive society is taken as an approval of such a society. Nietzsche believed that the goal of mankind is the production of the philosophical genius-- a goal so rarely acknowledged in the modern world that it must be publicized by people "consecrated to culture". Mankind should look for and make conditions under which philosophical geniuses can come into being since mankind can come to a conscious 64 awareness of its goal to create philosophical geniuses through its capacity for thought. Only by living for the creation of the philosophical genius can one's individual life receive the highest value. To promote the philosophical genius, everyone in a nation should strive for a higher spiritual growth than that which they at present possess: if they do not become philosophical geniuses themselves, the work that they have accomplished might aid others in becoming great thinkers. This striving is done by people Nietzsche called "people consecrated to culture", by people who promote the creation of philosophical geniuses, the makers of worldviews. But "people consecrated to culture" must employ their own wishes as an assessment of the world around them, and finally' as a Ibattle against. those influences, customs, laws, and institutions in.‘which. they' fail to see the promotion of the creation of the philosophical genius. Nietzsche said that "people consecrated to culture" find that other people believe that the goals of nature can be attained without a conscious effort towards attaining them. The position held by the latter people is contrary to the one held by the former people. Therefore, "people consecrated to culture" feel the need to make the above- mentioned goals conscious to all.8 Nietzsche argued that to become a great thinker, a 8 Elizabeth. Foerster-Nietzsche, The INietesche-Waqner Correspondence (New York: Liveright, 1921), pp. 215-9. " 65 person must face and triumph over despairing of the truth by creating a philosophy he genuinely believes is true to life as a whole, for it is on this philosophy that culture is based. Despairing of the truth comes from being psychically wounded by the Kantian belief that people are not able to make up their mind whether or not that which they call the truth actually is the truth, or whether it merely appears to them to be the truth. After Kant, Schopenhauer took his audience from the heights of skepticism and critical renunciation up to the heights of tragic contemplation. Nietzsche announced that the greatness of Schopenhauer lay in his having constructed a picture of life as a whole, so that life may be interpreted as a whole. In contrast. to great. philosopher's like Schopenhauer, academic philosophers merely argue over the work of great philosophers, thereby eluding the challenge of every great philosophy, which says: this is the way life in its entirety is, and learn from this the meaning of your own existence. Like all great philosophies, Schopenhauer's philosophy should be interpreted by an individual only for himself, so as to gain insight into his own desires and limitedness, and so as to then discover the nature of submission to the noblest goals, above all to those of love and justice. Moreover, great thinkers teach us how pursuing these virtues gains significance only through the attainment of strength capable of aiding the evolution of man, nature's greatest accomplishment. Nietzsche believed 66 that the evolution of man is advanced by philosophers, and not by sacrificing oneself to the direction in which history is supposedly travelling towards. Great philosophers triumph over despairing of the truth by creating philosophies which they do not doubt are true to life as a whole, and philosophies from which others can learn from to tap their own potential and to base a culture on. Nietzsche averred that to arrive at a philosophy or worldview on which culture is to be based, one must also overcome hazards arising from the time one lives in. He stated that it is the philosopher's task to determine the value of life anew. To do this, a philosopher must make plenty of allowances for the insignificance of his age if he is to be just to life as a whole. Everything contemporary seems troublesomely urgent to a philosopher. He will therefore involuntarily appraise it too high. That is why the philosopher has to deliberately under-estimate the importance of his time when comparing it to other eras. By triumphing over what is transitory in the present himself, the philosopher also overcomes it in the view he gives of existence. Nietzsche stated that if a modern philosopher is to be a fair judge of existence, a modern philosopher should be a "living" human being. This is the reason it is modern thinkers who are the strongest promoters of the will to create, and why from out of their own tired era the desire for culture emerges. But this 67 desire also makes up their hazard: there is a battle within them between the reformer of life and the philosopher. Like all great individuals, Schopenhauer eluded this hazard by fighting against those aspects of his time that kept him from being entirely himself. This is why unique individuals' works can be used as a reflection of their time: but everything transitory and banal in their age will by definition appear as "a disfiguring illness, as thin and pale". "And when he had conquered his age in himself", Schopenhauer beheld with astonishment the genius in himself.9 Nietzsche may have meant that to discover what is unique and eternal in one's self, one has to expose and expel what is transitory in one's self, qualities given to one by the commonplace peculiarities of the time in which they live. Nietzsche claimed that two images of great thinkers that the modern age gives humans as examples of how to become unique individuals capable of formulating a philosophy by which to base a culture are the images of Rousseau and Goethe. From the image of Rousseau, there has come a power that has promoted violent social revolutions. Nietzsche did not oppose social revolutions when it is acknowledged that it is a great man, in this case Rousseau, who is the inspiration for them. Oppressed by presumptuous upper classes, people inspired by the spirit of Rousseau have scornfully thrown off old ludicrous customs so that 9 Nietzsche, Untimely, p. 146. 68 they might claim for themselves their due and improve themselves. Nietzsche wrote that unlike the man of Rousseau, the man of Goethe is no such dangerous force, but is a corrective for exactly those threatening excitations of which the man of Rousseau is prone to. Unlike the man of Rousseau, the man of Goethe loathes all violence, sudden transition, and abrupt action: he is not a "world- liberator" but a "world-traveller". The Goethean man examines all of the areas of life, nature, history, art, science, and mythology. A person resembling Goethe is a thinking man who consumes for his health everything great from history. The follower of Goethe is not a revolutionary but a conservative and conciliatory force. According to Nietzsche, both Rousseau and Goethe were philosophical geniuses. Nietzsche argued that the third type of man in modern times worthy of admiration by people seeking to become great philosophers is the Schopenhauerean man, a heroic, truthful man. The man of Schopenhauer willingly takes upon himself the anguish inherent in facing the harsh realities of existence. This anguish crushes his intemperate willfulness and readies him for the transformation of his being which it is the actual meaning of existence to engender. The expression of the truth a Schopenhauerean person speaks of appears to other people as wicked since they take the preservation of their deficiencies as an honored duty. The man of Schopenhauer 69 believes that everything which lives that can be condemned deserves to be condemned. The Schopenhauerean man believes that to have a valid philosophy or worldview, a person must believe that it cannot in any way be refuted and that it is in itself true: this is the reason why philosophers feel that the significance of their actions is metaphysical, is intelligible through the norms of a higher existence, and is positive, even though their activities seem to be destructive of the laws of everyday existence. Nietzsche contended that it is from the destruction of the norms of everyday life that the truthful man's suffering arises. The Schopenhauerean man also suffers because however much he may seek after justice, he is bound, in accordance with the limits of his human insight, to be unfair when judging life. Nietzsche professed that the consolation for suffering accepted by a man of Schopenhauer is that the highest existence that people can hope for is to attain a heroic one, since joyful existence is not possible. The man of Schopenhauer believes that people are incapable of being happy because the world is a cruel place filled with struggling and competing beings. A person who leads a heroic life battles against great problems for the benefit of his fellowman and ends up victorious, is ill-rewarded, and is later celebrated as a hero. A hero wishes to be conscious of the harsh realities of life because he realizes that he incurs the danger of not discovering his unique self by inadvertently following the distractions 70 present in modern, everyday life. The heroic man takes it as his task to destroy all that is becoming, to bring to light all that is false in things. He too wants to know everything, but not as the Goethean man[, who] preserve[s] himself and take[s] delight in the multiplicity of things; he himself is his first sacrifice to himself...he hopes for nothing more for himself and in all thin 8 he wants to see down to this depth of hopelessness.1 Nietzsche may have been saying that the heroic man is a man who criticizes things in the world which are commonplace and transitory so as to discover what things are eternal or imperishable. A heroic man is one whose self which contains transitory elements is sacrificed in order that he might find the self within him which is genuine and everlasting. Nietzsche claimed that a person can reach what is authentic and eternal in their self and can formulate a worldview for his people through practical means, but he must be wary of distractions along the way. For Nietzsche, the hardest task of reaching one's real self is how one may proceed to so noble a goal through practical activity. The Schopenhauerean man seems to be very open to the dilemma that once he oversteps the limits of his capabilities he knows neither what he wishes nor what should do: knowing that he is acting beyond his means, his dignity can only exclude him from any involvement in the world of action. To hang on to life madly and blindly with no higher aim than to hang on to it...that is what it means to be an 10 Ibid., p. 155. 71 animal: and if all nature jpresses towards ‘man, it thereby intimates that man is necessary for the redemption of nature from the curse of the life of the animal, and that in him existence at last holds up before itself a mirror in which life appears no longer senseless but in its metaphysical significance. Nietzsche was perhaps observing that nature has given people the ability to understand their existence reflectively: man is able to give his existence meaning through a comprehensive worldview since he has the capacity to think. As long as people wish for life as they wish for happiness, he declared, they have not yet lifted their desires above those of animals, since they only want more consciously what animals desire through naked instinct. Finding out what one's existence signifies is within most people's grasp, Nietzsche stated, but one must avoid being distracted in pursuit of this goal. In individual moments, all people are aware of how the most intricate arrangements of their existence are constructed only so that they may escape from the duties they really should be performing, duties leading to self-discovery. Haste is common because most people are in flight from themselves. Most people believe that it is enough to be aware that they are capable of the profound contemplation by which to find themselves and that they need not realize this capability. Yet even this awareness is not achieved through their own strength, but through the power of philosophers, artists, and saints, of people possessing the ability for the profound 11 Ibid., p. 157. 72 contemplation through which a common worldview is created. Nietzsche decreed that the basis of culture lies in promoting the production of people-- the philosopher, artist, and saint-- capable of formulating a common worldview through their insight into the nature of existence. When a genuine artist, philosopher, and saint comes into being, nature reaches its goal, which is the creation of a person who gives expression to an insight into the nature of existence. A true philosopher is one in whom occurs a new and enigmatic serenity which lies protracted over the great everyday changes undergone by common people, and which comes from a new understanding of the nature of life in general. Like Hegel, Nietzsche insisted that nature requires the philosopher and artist for the achievement of its own self-understanding; nature needs them so that it might behold a clear and complete expression of the self-knowledge which it could see only vaguely during the course of its evolution. In other words, the evolution of life needs to be re-assessed by the philosopher to take into account changes which have occurred since it was last evaluated. The re-assessment of the significance of life by the philosopher can then be used as the basis of his people's worldview. In agreement with Goethe, Nietzsche stated that "nature's experiments are of value only when the artist comes to comprehend its stammerings...and gives expression to what all these experiments are really about...[and this expression] is of 73 absolutely no other use. And so nature at last needs the saint".12 He may have been saying that the artist knows that his work expresses a new, universal way of understanding life which many people will not heed because they do not find it useful in any practical or mundane sense. So that philosophers and artists are able to endure non-recognition, they must also become saints. A saint is one in whom the ego is completely absent, and whose life of suffering is felt as a deep feeling of identity with every living thing.13 In the saint, there is found that transfiguration which nature strives to achieve through self-understanding-- which Nietzsche called redemption. The saint is capable of love so great that he no longer possesses an ego. He shows people that there lies something eternal beyond people's everyday self which makes life meaningful. The man who becomes an artist, philosopher, and saint is one who does so for the improvement of humanity. According to Nietzsche, culture demands that we promote the repeated creation of genius in the form of the artist, philosopher and saint by discovering what is harmful to it and removing it. Nietzsche stated that people hate themselves because they are too lazy to promote the creation of genius. It is this hatred which is the cause of the pessimism which 12 Ibid., p. 160. 13 Georges Chatterton-Hill, The Philoeophv of Nietzsche: An Exposition and Appreciation (London: Heath, 1914), p. 64-9. 74 Schopenhauer taught his era, even though it has existed for as long as the wish for culture has existed. Nietzsche contended that even though a great philosopher like Schopenhauer grew up surrounded by the unnatural elegance of the modern age, Schopenhauer was not damaged. by this elegance on. account of his republican spirit, humanity, and singularity of vision or worldview. The artificial elegance of Schopenhauer's time came very near to him in the figure of his pompous and culturally pretentious mother. Yet, the proud, independent, republican nature of his father protected him from his mother and gave to him the inflexibility and rugged masculinity a philosopher requires. In his travels abroad, Schopenhauer was given the opportunity to study not books but people, and to honor not governments but the search for truth, two elements Nietzsche believed philosophers also needed. For Schopenhauer, the purpose of the state was to offer its citizens protection against foreign powers, internal disorder, and. the state itself: protection is essential if people are to continue to create philosophy and art. In addition to his republican character, the fact that Schopenhauer was not merely a thinker, but a real human being also sheltered him from harm by his era. For Nietzsche, the thinker who is also a real human being never lets ideas, viewpoints, history, or books get between himself and the world: this kind of person will obtain an immediate perception of the world and will be able to 75 create an immediately perceived reflection of the world. By' perceiving himself and. the ‘world as objectively as possible, Schopenhauer was a philosopher and a genuine person, and eventually created a true picture of the present world. Schopenhauer had seen... a dreadful scene in a supraterrestrial court in which all life... had been weighed and found wanting: he had seen the saint as judge of existence... we can demonstrate that he saw this tremendous vision as a young man, and... Everything he subsequently appropriated to himself from life and books... was to him hardly more than colouring and means of expression. 4 Nietzsche may have been stating that Schopenhauer was a great human philosopher inasmuch as he experienced a vision by which his thought was guided: the renunciation of desire exhibited by the image of the saint is the most noble state a person can achieve in a world where the continual conflict of individual wills resulted in frustration and pain. Nietzsche believed that the great human philosopher will not be engendered if a person is not. given the complete freedom to pursue the truth on which his people's culture may be based. He stated that some of the conditions under which the philosophical genius can come into existence in Ihis time despite the forces working against him are "free manliness of character, early knowledge of mankind, no scholarly education, no narrow patriotism, no necessity for bread-winning, no ties with 14 Nietzsche, Untimely, p. 182. 76 the state-- in short freedom and again freedom".15 He was possibly saying that the freedom to think the way one desires and freedom from obligations one has to others are essential to the education of the philosophical genius. Nietzsche believed that great philosophers like Schopenhauer are overlooked by the state and only come into being of their own accord. He added that the modern state only appears to promote philosophy by giving people the task or apparent freedom to pursue and teach philosophy in educational settings. He claimed that the freedom which the modern state gives philosophy is not freedom at all but a way to make a living. Because of the abuse of philosophy by the modern state, a. position for real philosophers external to the institutions of the state is the only way philosophy can fulfil the function it was meant to fulfil, the regulation of the life of a people. "There should be created outside the universities a higher tribunal whose function would be to supervise and judge these institutions in regard to the education they are promoting: and as soon as philosophy... purifies itself of all unworthy considerations and prejudices... it will know how to perform its duty free of the Zeitgeist and free from fear of it". Nietzsche may' have been asserting that philosophers will be able to judge more impartially the competency of people seeking employment within their nation's institutions if they have no ties with and derive 15 Ibid., p. 182. 77 no reward from the institutions they will be managing. In the same manner, philosophers should be able to supervise over the life of a nation in general. "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk... A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits". He was perhaps maintaining that it is the great philosopher who, through his work, gives his people a basis for culture, a basis around which life is made meaningful through the view of existence he creates.16 For Nietzsche, a philosopher should be given complete leisure to do what he wants to do, since his task is to make life in general explicable for his fellowman. For the philosopher, "who gazes upon things as a poet does, with pure and loving eyes, and cannot immerse himself too deeply in them, grubbing around in countless strange and perverse opinions is the most repugnant and inappropriate occupation imaginable". He might have been arguing that it is the philosopher's wish or task to not only learn the opinions of other philosophers or scholars, but to create ideas of his own. "The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and proves something, namely trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it, has never been taught at universities: all that has ever been taught is a critique of words by means of other words".17 Nietzsche 15 Ibid., p. 192. 17 Ibid., pp. 186-7. 78 may have been maintaining that it is the ability of promoting action, culture, or life that makes philosophy valuable. He believed that this ability was not being fostered by academic philosophers. "As long as this officially recognized guild of pseudo-thinkers continues to exist", he noted, any effectiveness of a true philosophy will be brought to naught or at least obstructed. . . through nothing other than the curse of the ludicrous which the representatives of that philosophy have called down upon themselves but which also strikes at philosophy itself. That is why I say it is a demand of culture that philosophy should be deprived of any official or academic recognition and that state and. academy' be relieved of the task, which they cannot encompass, of distinguishing between real and apparent philosophy. Let the philosophers grow unattended.18 Since the goal of philosophy is to seek for the truths by which people should live, Nietzsche was possibly recommending that philosophy should not be pursued in a purely scientific manner or setting. Philosophy deals with concepts people should base their lives on, and therefore must be created by people who gain knowledge of life not only by engaging in work conducted in a fashion similar to that of the sciences, but also through their experiences of life among people in society. 13 Ibid., p. 190. III. Knowledge, History and Culture This chapter will begin by showing that Nietzsche believed that Germans of his time were not capable of developing a strong culture because they pursued knowledge in general and history as ends in themselves. By knowledge as an end in itself, Nietzsche meant knowledge which is not directed toward some practical end or which is not organized and directed by the worldview of a culture. As will be discussed in the second section of this chapter, Nietzsche believed that applied knowledge is more valuable than knowledge as an end in itself because the former strengthens people's will to power through its ability to make them capable of taking greater charge of their lives. Nietzsche Ibelieved that knowledge as an end in itself weakens the will-to-power or personality of people. The will-to-power of modern people was weakened by knowledge as an end in itself since it promoted the belief-- which gave people the idea that nothing more need be created-- that their age was the final and best stage of history: this belief spurred them to worship great events of the past instead of inspiring the actions needed to cause future great events. At the same time, history was used by the modern state to make the masses docile: the state told them that they were the movers of history when, according to 79 80 Nietzsche, they were not. Finally, for Nietzsche, when too much emphasis is placed on the thinking process and not enough emphasis is placed on the process of feeling and acting when acquiring knowledge, knowledge cannot give the philosopher a basis by which to discover the worldview of his people and cannot inspire people to be constructive or useful. Nietzsche claimed that the study of history and other fields of learning without a view as to how they might be useful to people threatens the birth of German culture. For history to be useful, it must help man to live constructively in his society. The intention of his essay on history is to show why instruction without invigoration, why knowledge not attended by action, why history as a costly superfluity and luxury, must, to use Goethe's word, be seriously hated by us-- hated because we still lack even the things we need and the superfluous is the enemy of the necessary. We need history... for the sake of life and action, not so as to turn comfortably away from life and action, let alone for the purpose of extenuating‘ the self-seeking life and. the Ibase .and cowardly action.1 Through this proclamation, he may have been attempting to tell his fellow Germans that it is pointless to study history as an end in itself. History as an end in itself may be defined as history which does not help people relate to their environment. It is the increased capacity of people to act creatively within their society which is the purpose of culture. "Here, I am attempting to look afresh 1 Nietzsche, Untimely, p. 59. 81 at something of which our time is rightly proud-- its cultivation of history-- as being injurious to it... [because] a hypertrophied virtue-- such as the historical sense of our age appears to be-- can ruin a nation just as effectively as a hypertrophied vice."2 Nietzsche was perhaps claiming that the pursuit of history as an end in itself by the past two generations of Germans stunted the ability of them to act as a united nation, and hindered the rise of culture. According to Nietzsche, that there is no unity between the inner thoughts and outer actions of modern man, especially the modern German, weakens modern people's personality and is one of the result's of an age over- saturated with the pursuit of history and knowledge as ends in themselves. Nietzsche claimed that the sublimity of great deeds are lessened because events are studied as soon as they occur. A person who seeks to understand an event without also appreciating it may be reasonable, but he misses the beauty in events that a child may see. The reason that man chooses to study' a moment instead of revelling in it is because he has destroyed his instincts and then, when his reason fails him, he no longer believes in himself and sinks into his own, not his culture's, subjectivity. Here, what he may have meant by instinct is the unified spirit of a people that a man inherits. Lacking this, a man can do nothing but respond to an event 2 Ibid., p. 60. 82 in the chaotic ‘way' he is used. to: by' relying' on 'the accumulated knowledge that he has learned, even though it has no relation to the world around him. "If one watches him from the outside, one sees how the expulsion of the instincts by history has transformed man almost into mere abstractis and shadows: no one dares appears as he is, but masks himself as a cultivated man, as a scholar, as a poet."3 By this, he was perhaps claiming that a history which does not serve the life, unified spirit, or "instincts" of a people is a type of history which does not give people the framework for performing actions comprehensible to theirselves or others. That people label themselves by their professions shows that they want to think of themselves as people capable of action, even when they really are not. Thus, knowledge or history as a goal in itself causes people to hide the truth of what they are from themselves and others. It is only in truthfulness, which Nietzsche hoped he was showing his audience, that the inner misery of modern man will come to light, and that, in place of a concealment through. convention, the. correct elements will combine to implant a culture which corresponds to real needs. Nietzsche alleged that the reason modern man needs to conceal his misery through convention is because his obsession with knowledge and history pursued for their own sake has drained him of his personality. "Within a 3 Ibid., p. 84. 83 historical culture philosophy’ possesses no right if it wants to be more than a self-restrained knowing which leads to no action... Are there still human beings, one asks oneself, or perhaps only thinking-, writing- and speaking- machines?"4 iNietzsche was perhaps recommending that the pursuit of knowledge as a goal in itself was draining people of the personality which they possessed. People were made into indistinguishable walking encyclopedias. For [Nietzsche, "history can only be borne by strong personalities, weak ones are crushed by it".5 The reason he believed this assertion to be true may have been because history pursued for its own sake, which he sometimes called "objective history", confused people's sensibilities when these were not strong enough to make sense of the past. If a man was confused in this manner, he no longer believed in himself and reflexively referred to "objective history" as to how he ought to regard the past. By making "undirected", "objective" history the sole guide as to how he should act, by not taking his needs into account when studying history, man's personality was emptied and made incapabLe of performing independent and directing action. After the personality was emptied by its constant need to refer to "objective" knowledge, it no longer allowed "an effect at all in the proper sense, that is an effect on 4 Ibid., p. 85. 5 Ibid., p. 86. 84 life and action".6 By this, he might have meant that once writers or historians lose the strength to direct their work for some practical end, they have lost the strength to direct their work and are instead directed by their work. That moderns were led by their work shows that the modern personality was weak. Nietzsche announced that if the condemnation and destruction of the past by the historical drive does not also contain a drive to create, the instinct for creation in the modern personality will be weakened and discouraged. Any' human practice that is 'transformed into Ihistorical knowledge, any practice which is meant to be comprehended entirely as an object of learning, will when this change is complete also be found to have been annihilated. The reason this annihilation occurs is because historical verification necessarily illuminates much that is vulgar, untrue, inhuman, absurd and violent that "the mood of pious illusion in which alone anything that wants to live can live necessarily crumbles away: for it is only... when shaded by the illusion produced by love, that is to say the unconditional faith in right and perfection, that man is creative".7 Here, he may have been purporting that history takes away people's desires to continue some of their practices because it shows people that these practices can 5 Ibid., p. 87. 7 Ibid., pp. 95-6. 85 be viewed as being blameworthy.8 Nietzsche believed that people were also prevented from acting and growing fully because of the institutionalization of knowledge as an end in itself in the modern world. He stated that during his time maturity as such is hated because history is held in greater honor than life... There is, indeed, rejoicing that new 'science is beginning to dominate life'... but life thus dominated is not of much value because it is far less living and guarantees far less life for the future than did a former life not dominated by knowledge but by instinct and powerful illusions. By this, he was perhaps saying that modern people were not growing because they were letting the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself dictate over their life instead of their instincts directing the ways knowledge should be approached. One of the reasons he believed modern people were behaving like this ‘was because this was the way learning was taught to them: knowledge as a goal in itself had been institutionalized. He contended that not only has the institutionalization of knowledge hindered the maturation of people, the popularization of knowledge has also resulted in the same effect. The young student of history "now knows: every age is different, it does not matter what you are like".10 Here, he may have been saying that the young people of modern times were given so much 8 J. P. Stern, Friedrich Nietzsche (Kingsport: Kingsport, 1978), pp. 52-5. 9 Nietzsche, Untimely, p. 97. 10 Ibid. 86 knowledge of the past that they came upon the realization that there was no purpose in acting one way as opposed to any other since human ideas and systems were transitory. In addition to making people indifferent to life, Nietzsche claimed that an excess of undirected history strengthens this indifference by making people think that there is nothing’ creative left. to do, that everything creative has already been done. Historical culture is a kind of inborn grey-hairedness and those who bear its mark from childhood must instinctively believe in the old age of mankind: to age, however, there pertains an appropriate senile occupation, that of looking back, of reckoning up, of closing accounts, of seeking consolation through remembering what has been, in short, historical culture. Nietzsche may have been saying that modern man's obsessive preoccupation with undirected history led modern man to believe that he is an old man with respect to the past, kept him old because it prevented him from striving to create anything new, and made him always look backwards. The belief that modern people were "latecomers" with respect to people of the past could be seen in that the increasing need for historical judgement by them was based on the assumption that the modern age was the final age of history, and that they were therefore empowered to exercise over the past. that universal judgement. which. Christian dogma supposed would be pronounced during the Second Coming. Nietzsche added that the belief by modern 11 Ibid., p. 101. 87 historians that the last age of mankind, the present, was the most important age of all time was harmful to all new growth, bold experimentation, and free aspiration. "Austere and profoundly serious reflection on the worthlessness of all that has occurred, on the ripeness of the world for judgement is dissipated into the skeptical attitude that it is at any rate as well to know about all that has occurred, since it is too late to do anything better".12 He was possibly maintaining that the tendency of contemporary history to condemn the past gave one the belief that the present age was the last one since it judged the past instead of creating the future: that everything worthy of being done had already been done and judged and that there was nothing left to be do. Nietzsche wrote that the belief by moderns that they were latecomers was not as negative a quality as their belief that their age ‘was the. greatest that. has ever existed, a belief that weakened people through the apathy it inspired in them, as was the case in Germany especially. German's misinterpretation of Hegel, that one is a latecomer of the ages is...paralysing and depressing: but it must appear dreadful and devastating when such. a. belief one day by' a bold inversion raises itself to godhood... Such a point of view has accustomed the Germans to... justify their own age as a necessary result of [the] world-process; such a point of view has accustomed the Germans to... justify their own age as the necessary result of [the] world process; such a point of view has set history... in place of the other spiritual powers, art and 12 Ibid., p. 102. 88 religion, as the sole sovereign power.13 He may have been pointing out that Hegelianism led modern Germans to believe that their own age was better than all past ages, and that this belief made cause for further action by them unnecessary, which for him was a negative quality that demeaned life. He was perhaps also claiming that to consider history more important than man's other endeavors was harmful to humanity since it had other needs besides history: people should use many elements of civilization to enrich their lives. Again, he blamed not Hegel but Hegelianism for implanting into generations of Germans an admiration for the power of history which changed every event into an "admiration for success" and "a worship of the factual." By these phrases, he may have meant that Hegelian historians made people idolize great events of the past instead of inspiring the action needed to be taken by people for future great events to occur. He loathed this admiration of history as an end in itself since he believed it made slaves of people: they served history and the purposes of the people who wrote it through the obedience it instilled in them. Nietzsche asserted that another way the excessive obedience paid to undirected history weakened man was by fostering in him a dangerous feeling of irony in regard to himself and subsequently into an even more dangerous mood of cynicism. For Nietzsche, there was in his age a kind of 13 Ibid., p. 104. 89 ironic self-awareness that was shown through ii loud and innocent rejoicing in the age's historical culture. At the same time, there was an awareness that this kind of culture will not survive into the future. Occasionally, people of his age ventured past irony into cynicism and justified the course of history and the evolution of the world by the belief that the transitory nature of the present age was inevitable. The pleasant mood produced by this type of cynicism was the hiding place of people who could not endure an ironical frame of mind. The fullest expression of this phase was the complete surrender of the individual personality to the "world-process" of history. For Nietzsche, the surrendering of individuality is dangerous since it subordinates the individual personality to the progression of history, when the reverse should occur for the benefit of humanity. Nietzsche believed that the modern individual was weakened because historians were no longer giving individuals credit for making history, but were giving the world-process, through its hold over people, credit instead. For Nietzsche, history as an end in itself offered his contemporaries entertainment because it offered them not a past created by great individuals but a past created by social evolution. Nietzsche believed that individuals, not groups, are the makers of history. The history of Nietzsche's age told people to go on living as before and that each person should surrender their 9O "personality to the world-process for the sake of its goal, world redemption". According to Nietzsche, the goal of humanity did not lie in its reaching a final end, in its being redeemed for all time, but in its producing continually its highest exemplars, great people. "The time will come... when one will regard not the masses but individuals who form a kind of bridge across the turbulent stream of becoming".14 He was perhaps suggesting that it is detrimental to the growth of mankind to see history the way the people who believe in the world-process view it, to see history as a striving toward perfection which uses people towards this goal. It is the opposite view which brings about the growth of culture: that great individuals live contemporaneously with one another, and thanks to history collaborate with each other. He added that the presumptuousness of people believing that they were the greatest people that has hitherto existed-- as modern people aware of history fancy themselves-- was detestable since it inhibited the rise of individuality. Individuality is not reached by surrendering one's personality to an idea outside one's self, but is attained by pursuing a goal which when brought into being makes one's personality stronger. "If, on the other hand, the doctrines of sovereign becoming... are thrust upon the people for another generation with the rage for instruction that has now become normal, no one shall be surprised if 14 Ibid., pp. 110-2. 91 the people perishes of petty egoism".15 By this, he might have been saying that the view of history as a world- process would lead to disunity among people because it inspires indifference among them. For him, writing history with regard to how' the lower‘ classes or the "masses" contributed to it was what history as a world process did. The lower classes only deserved notice in that they were very weak spiritually compared to great people, were a force of resistance to great individuals, and were instruments in the hands of great men. History during Nietzsche's time denoted greatness as that which had moved the lower classes for any length of time. But, according to Nietzsche, greatness does not come from the success of mass movements since the people participating in these movements do not act out of the profundity from which their movement originated, the profundity of great individuals, as was the case for Christianity. Nietzsche contended that history as a world-process not only made the lower classes appear as history's Champion's, it also led to the subordination of these classes by the state and to the destruction in young people of the drive for excellence. According to him, humanity believed that the egoism of individuals, groups and the masses has at all times been the force of the movements of history. This belief has led to a faith in which now one is setting to work with the purpose of building the history 15 Ibid. 92 of the future on the basis of egoism: only it is to be a more prudent egoism than in the past, an egoism which pursues history precisely so as to become acquainted with that previous imprudent egoism. During this type of pursuit, it has been found that a quite special role in the founding' of the ‘world-system. of egoism falls upon the state: "it has to be the patron of all the prudent egoisms so as to protect them with all its military and police forces. against ‘the ‘terrifying' outbreaks ‘which. imprudent egoism is liable".16 What he may have meant here was that the people who were controlling modern states had histories written which justified their rule as the outcome of historical necessity. For Nietzsche, prudent egoism was an egoism which told people to follow passively the dictates of their rulers. The reason history was taught to the "dangerous", imprudent working classes was because it was believed that it would break down their rude instincts and lead them into the path of a prudent egoism. Such a historically cultivated egoism was followed by people who were not capable of creative action but only of clinging to life with a repulsive greed and lack of dignity. "We know", he stated, what history can do when it gains a certain ascendancy... it can cut off the strongest instincts of youth, its fire defiance... at the roots... it can deprive youth of its... power to implant in itself the belief in a great idea and then let it grow to an even greater' one by... preventing them from. feeling' and acting unhistorically. From an infinite horizon he 15 Ibid., p. 114. 93 then returns to himself, to the smallest egoistic enclosure, and there he must grow withered and dry.17 Nietzsche may have been arguing that the historically cultivated egoism that the then current drive for knowledge as a goal in itself aimed at would result in a lack of young people with a drive necessary for the emergence of greatness. Nietzsche held that to be capable of future greatness, young people in Germany must first face the fact that they were without such a capability because of the way they had been educated. He professed that the education of German youth proceeded from an unfruitful idea of culture because its goal was not the creation of the philosophical man but the scholar, the most speedily employable man of science, who stood outside of life so as to know it unobstructedly. That an education with this aim was not a natural one was apprehended only by people who had not yet been completely processed by it; it was only apprehended by the feelings of youth, since youth still possessed that feeling of nature which remains intact until forcibly ruined by this education. A person who desires to destroy this education must help these feelings of youth speak out by destroying first of all the superstition that the only goals of education are to make people employable and to teach them. One has to destroy the belief that young people must first be educated with the knowledge of culture 17 Ibid., p. 115. 94 since their' wish to feel growing' within themselves an intelligible living complex of their own experiences is muddled and intoxicated by the illusory belief that it is possible to sum up in theirself the greatest experiences of past times in only a few years. For Nietzsche, German youth can build a culture only if they first confront the truth that Germany possessed no culture because its educational institutions provided no basis for one. If a late nineteenth century German knew what his life consisted of, he would say: I am "fragmented and in pieces[,]... suffering from the malady of words and mistrusting any feeling of [my] own which has not yet been stamped with words... perhaps I still have the right to say of myself... that I am a thinking creature, [but] not that I am a living one."18 Nietzsche was perhaps saying that it was the capacity for thought that one gained from the processed, mass education ("words") of modern-day Germany. For Nietzsche, mass education did not contribute to life and culture, to the creation of new works and the performance of enormous deeds through constructive action. * 4 * This essay argues that Nietzsche believed that a philosopher's worldview can offer a basis by which scholars and scientists pursue knowledge so that it is useful to the necessities of their community. Knowledge should be in a form easily assimilable by a people and organized according 18 Ibid., pp. 118-9. 95 to the worldview or recognized reality of the world they live th This part of chapter three shows that Nietzsche believed that knowledge directed by a people's needs is beneficial to culture. He did not tell us which needs are acceptable, only that it is the task of the philosopher to ascertain their people's needs. Using history as an example, Nietzsche argued that there are three main ways that knowledge of the past can lead to cultural growth. First, history can provide role models people can learn and receive inspiration from. Secondly, history can preserve and honor a people's past so that people feel that they have firm roots within the world. Third, history condemns parts of the past which are detrimental to the development of the life of a people. For Nietzsche, the way history or any kind of learning can be useful to culture is if it is based on the common needs of a people, if it is given to people in a form in which it can be assimilated by them, and if it corresponds to the reality of the world they live in. Nietzsche held that history, or knowledge of any kind, is capable of leading to true culture or of giving people a constructive way of understanding their environment only if it is given a form by which it can be assimilated by them. He claimed that modern man was given a great deal of knowledge to ingest from many fields of learning, and that this knowledge was not presented in such a way that a man could be capable of employing it 96 constructively. The most characteristic quality of a modern man with such "uncontrolled" knowledge in him is the remarkable antithesis between an interior which fails to correspond to any exterior and an exterior which fails to correspond to any interior... knowledge, consumed for the greater part without any hunger for it and even counter to one's needs, now no longer acts as an agent for transforming the outside world but remains concealed within a chaotic inner world which modern man describes... as his uniquely characteristic 'subjectivity'. It is then said that one possess content and only form is lacking: but such an antithesis is quite improper when applied to living things. This is precisely why our modern culture is not a living thing... it is not real culture at all but only a kind of knowledge of culture.19 In this passage, Nietzsche possibly claimed that modern people were consuming knowledge that did not provide the basis by which they could approach life constructively. In fact, the "uncontrolled" knowledge given to and ingested by moderns broke down their ability to communicate with their fellowman and environment. In addition, he might have been asserting that living things, like a man and a culture, require that the content of knowledge be given a form based on their worldview if it is itself to become a living thing and be beneficial to people. The element which gives the content of knowledge a form and thus make it useful to people is the procurement and presentation of knowledge in accordance with their worldview, which is derived from the needs of the person and people for whom the knowledge is intended. A culture which has a knowledge of things but no worldview within which to constructively harness this 19 Ibid., p. 78. 97 knowledge will create works of art ‘which. will not be understood by their audience since there will be no acknowledged or recognizable perspective by which they can be comprehended. In defining the culture of a people as the "unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people", what is meant by this "is that a people to whom one attributes a culture has to be in all reality a single living unity and not fall wretchedly apart into inner and outer, content and form".20 Here, he may have been saying that the content of a product of culture by a person must be presented in a form which is comprehensible to his neighbor. But, taking what he had said before, the element which makes a work based on knowledge of any kind recognizable and valuable to a people arises from the fact that the creator of the work has taken materials from his environment and given them a form directed by his people's peculiar worldview. According to Nietzsche, knowledge and history are valuable to a people and a culture as long as knowledge and history promote people's capacity for constructive action. He maintained that it is possible to live almost with no memory, as animals demonstrate, but that it is almost wholly impossible to live at all without forgetting.21 To determine the degree to which the past has to be forgotten 20 Ibid., p. 79. 21 M. A. Mugge, Friedrich Nietzsche (London: T. Fischer Unwinn, 1914), pp. 115-8. 98 so that it may not kill the present, one would have to know precisely how strong the plastic power of a person, nation, and culture is. Plastic power is "the capacity to develop out of oneself in one's own way, to transform and incorporate into oneself what is past and foreign, to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, to recreate broken moulds".22 By ‘this, perhaps. Nietzsche ‘meant ‘that the stronger the roots of a person's, people's, or culture's nature, the more easily he or it will be able to absorb and appropriate the matters of past times. "That which such a nature cannot subdue, it knows how to forget; it no longer exists, the horizon is rounded and closed... And this is a universal law: a living thing can be healthy, strong, and fruitful only when bounded by a horizon".23 Nietzsche may have been stating that people should absorb only as much knowledge as they are capable of using creatively. For Nietzsche, the "historical sense" or reflection and "unhistorical" sense or action are necessary in varying degrees for the health of a man, community, and culture. Yet, he viewed the unhistorical sense as being more vital to life than the historical sense inasmuch as the former sense makes up the basis upon which anything living can grow, growth being equated with taking action. Nietzsche believed that the only way a person can begin an action is by ceasing to think. He argued that it is through action 22 Nietzsche, Untimely, p. 62. 23 Ibid., p. 63. 99 that life flourishes. The unhistorical sense is like an atmosphere within which alone life can germinate... [the unhistorical condition is] narrow- minded, ungrateful to the past, blind to dangers, deaf to warnings, one is a little vortex of life in a dead sea of darkness and oblivion: and yet this condition... is the womb of not only the unjust but of every just deed too... he who acts... forgets most things so as to do one thing... and he recognizes the rights of only that which is to now come into being. He was possibly advancing that for an action to occur, one must forget things incidental to the accomplishing of that action and the thought prepatory to taking that action because the reflection upon such things will hinder the engendering of that action. According to Nietzsche, historical and "suprahistorical" men employ history and knowledge to increase people's ability to take action by aiding people to think and act unhistorically. Suprahistorical people believe that the essential pre-condition of bringing any event into being is the blindness and injustice paid to other events. Nietzsche remarked that because the suprahistorical man views the outcome of events as springing from the injustice paid to other possible outcomes and from men for whom rational deliberation has been set aside so as to act, the suprahistorical man does not believe that justice and reason are the motive forces of history. For such a man there is no salvation in the progression of history: the world is complete at each and every moment. The past and the present are taken as one by 24 Ibid., p. 64. 100 suprahistorical people, who believe that the only significance within history lies in the typically unchanging needs of man. A historical phenomenon known clearly and completely and resolved into a phenomenon of knowledge [by the historical man], is, for him who has perceived it, dead... History become pure, sovereign science would be for mankind a sort of conclusion of life... The study of history is something salutary and fruitful for the future only as the attendant of a mighty' new current of life, of an evolving culture for example, that is to say only when it is dominated and directed by a higher force and does not itself dominate and direct. He may have been saying that history should be conducted with an eye on how it may help people control their future, live their lives, and create their culture. For Nietzsche, the growth of culture can occur only when looking to the past impels historical people towards the future and strengthens their courage to go on living and their hope that what they desire will come into being. Unlike suprahistorical people, historical people maintain that the meaning of existence will come increasingly more to light as time goes on. Historical people believe that by studying the progression of life they can learn to comprehend the present and to create the future. Nietzsche laid down that it is historical people in the sense used here who could aid in the development of German life and culture: despite historical people's preoccupation with history, they reflect and act unhistorically, and their study of history serves action and culture, not knowledge. 25 Ibid., p. 78. 101 Nietzsche contended that Germans will possess the foundation upon which to base a culture when they begin to think and act un- or supra-historically. By the word unhistorical, he meant the power of forgetting or acting, and of enclosing one's self inside a limited and controllable mental horizon. What he meant by supra- historical was the ability to see things in life as being eternal, like artists and philosophers see things. The historical way of approaching the world is to regard everything as changing and unstable. He added that science, or the "historical sense," sees the un- and supra- historical senses as enemies since it sees the scientific way of regarding things -- that which views everywhere things in flux, things historical, and views nowhere things unchanging, things eternal-- as the only right way of approaching the world. Further, he maintained that life is a higher and more dominating force than knowledge since knowledge presupposes life and has in the preservation of life the same interest as any being has in its continued existence. For Nietzsche, science, the "historical sense", or knowledge, requires supervision: a law belongs close behind science which would state that the supra- and un- historical senses are the natural antidotes to the suppression of life caused by the misuse of history. He declared that the mission of young people will be to undermine the ideas young people have of "health" and "culture" and to incite hatred against these ideas. The 102 mark which guarantees the superior health of these young people is that they can discover in themselves no idea based on the contemporary currency of words but are only conscious of the existence within themselves of a more intense feeling of life. Moreover, he asserted that the element which will deliver young people from the malady of history as an end in itself will be the study of history in its monumental, antiquarian, and critical forms. Nietzsche believed that history can inspire man to action if it is "monumental" in nature. "That the great moments in the struggle of the human individual constitute a chain, that the summit of such a long-ago moment shall be for me still living, bright and great-- that is the fundamental idea of the faith in humanity' which finds expression in the demand for a monumental history". He may have meant that monumental history gives people examples of past people at their greatest moments. Monumental history is written for the man of deeds and strength, for him who fights a great battle, and for the man who needs role models and educators since he cannot find them among his fellowman. Where the man of action "finds inspiration to imitate or do better", Nietzsche stated, he does not wish to encounter the idler who... prowls around as though through pictures in a gallery... his goal, however, is happiness, perhaps not his own but often that of a nation or of mankind as a whole; he flees from resignation and needs history as a specific against it... for the commandment which rules over him is: that which in the past was able to expand the concept "man" and make it more beautiful must exist everlastingly... But it is precisely this demand that greatness shall be everlasting that sparks off the most 103 fearful struggles. For everything' else ‘that lives cries No. What Nietzsche was possibly saying in this passage was that the purpose of monumental history is to inspire people who read it seriously, people of action, to great deeds. For Nietzsche, a man who accomplishes great things is one whose goal is to accomplish something great which has not yet been accomplished so that the great deeds which have marked history do not cease. He may have also been contending that if a man of action despairs because he cannot find a role model in his time for inspiration because he is surrounded by "idlers", by people who do not take monumental history seriously, monumental history can provide a man of action with a role model and a haven from "idlers" too. All great men of action leave "behind them a single teaching: that he lives best who has no respect for existence".27 By this, he means that what makes people great men of action is that they consider their acts or creations as more important than their lives and that they would sacrifice their lives in order to engender them. Even though great men of action are mortal, their works, acts, and creations live on in monumental histories long after their bodies have left the earth. Nietzsche claimed that in monumental history much of the past has to be overlooked, generalized, and 25 Ibid., p. 68. 27 Ibid., p. 69. 104 poeticized since it seeks to inspire greatness in people by telling of the greatness which once existed. Since the great things which were once accomplished can never be accomplished in exactly the same way again, monumental history does not require total veracity: it only needs to deal with approximations and generalities, with making what is different look similar. Monumental history should always minimize the differences of motives so as to exhibit the effects as something exemplary and worthy of imitation. The truly historical connection of cause and effect would only show that the future could never again engender anything exactly similar to what was created in the past. In monumental history, the past itself suffers harm: whole segments of it are forgotten, despised, and flow away in an interrupted colourless flood, and only individual embellished facts rise out of it like islands... Monumental history deceives by analogies: with seductive similarities it inspires the courageous to foolhardiness and the inspired to fanaticism. In this passage, Nietzsche may have been claiming that monumental history runs the risk of becoming distorted, beautified, mythicized, poeticized, and/or fictionalized since its goal is to inspire men to action and to describe the past as something worthy of imitation, and as imitable and possible again. In conclusion, Nietzsche stated that if the person who desires to do something has any need of history at all, he takes possession of it by means of a monumental history. 23 Ibid., p. 71. 105 Along with monumental history, another kind of history Nietzsche believed serves life and culture is antiquarian history. The antiquarian serves culture by preserving that which has existed from the past for use by future generations. The antiquarian's veneration of the past is of great value in that it serves life by spreading a feeling of contentment over the modest. and wretched conditions under which a person or a nation lives. For Nietzsche, monumental history is needed alongside the antiquarian type because whereas the antiquarian serves life by preserving the past, the monumental serves life by inspiring in the man of action the firm resolve to attempt something new.29 In addition to a monumental and an antiquarian history, Nietzsche asserted that a critical history in the service of life is also needed by a people. A critical history is a history which judges and condemns the past. For Nietzsche, a person who possesses the strength for historical justice is one who judges things without doubting that his judgments are correct, even though, being a human being, he is capable of error. A just man "desires truth, not as cold, ineffectual knowledge, but as a regulating and punishing judge; truth, not as the egoistic possession of the individual, but as the sacred right to overturn all boundary stones of egoistic possessions".30 29 Ibid., p. 73. 3° ibid., p. 88. 106 In this quotation, he might have been alleging that knowledge as a goal in itself is not the kind of truth a man of justice can employ since it is not organized in a manner which would render judgments from it possible, such as would emanate from critical history. A critical history is needed by people who want to free themselves from the aberrations or injustices of the past. Critical history aids man in fighting against his inherited nature by implanting in him a new nature. It is an attempt to give oneself a history into which one would like to have been born, in opposition to the history in which one was actually born into. Nietzsche concluded that the danger of this type of history lies in that it is difficult to perceive the extent to which people should re-write their past because new natures are by nature normally weaker than old ones. "Every man and nation requires", he noted, in accordance with his goal, energies, and needs, a certain kind of knowledge of the past, now in the form of monumental, now of antiquarian, now of critical history: but it does not require it as a host of pure thinkers. .. to whom the accumulation of knowledge is itself the goal, but always and only for the ends of life... that knowledge of the past has at all times been in the service of the future and the present. By this, perhaps Nietzsche meant that written correctly, the monumental, critical, and antiquarian approaches to history can serve peoples' lives inasmuch as they are written with that end in mind, and not with the goal of amassing as much undirected knowledge as possible, as was 31 Ibid., p. 77. 107 the case in the Germany of his time. For Nietzsche, the natural relationship of a culture or a nation with its knowledge should be regulated by the extent of its needs and by its worldview, and be held in bounds by its capacity to effectively utilize and employ its history and knowledge. Moreover, he held that history and knowledge only have value if they aid a person or people to live their life actively and constructively. BIBLIOGRAPHY Baumer, Franklin. Modern European Thought. New York: Macmillan, 1977. Bergmann, Peter. Nietzsche, "The Last Anti-Political German. Bloomingdale: Indiana U., 1987. Chatterton-Hill, Georges. The Philosgphy of Nietzsche: an Exposition and Appreciation. London: Heath, 1914. Copleston, Frederick. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosopher of Culture. London: Search Press, 1942. Danto, Authur. Nietzsche as Philosopher. New York: Columbia U., 1980. Das Grosse Deutsche Worterbuch. Gutersloh: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1967. Fisher-Dieskau, Dietrich. Wagner and Nietzsche. New York: Seabury, 1976. Foerster-Nietzsche, Elizabeth. The Nietzsche-Wagner Correepondence. New York: Liverright, 1921. Haymen, Ronald. Friedrich Nietzsche: A Critical Life. Harrisonburg: R. R. Donnelley & Sons, 1982. Inkeles, A. What is Sociology ?. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1964. Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche. Philosopher. Pevchologiet. Antichrist. Princeton: Princeton U., 1974. Knight, A. H. J. Some Aepecte of the Life and Work of Nietzsche. New York: Russell & Russell, 1967. Kroeber, Alfred and Kluckhohn, Clyde. Culture: A Critical Review of Concepte and Definitione. New York: Vintage, 1962. Lowith, Karl. From Hegel to Nietzsche. New York: Doubleday, 1967. Magnus, Bernd. Nietzsche's Existential Imperative. 108 109 Bloomingdale: Indiana U., 1978. Marx, K. and Engels, F. Selected Worke. New York: International publ., 1936. Vol. 1. McGinn, Robert E. "Culture as Prophylactic: Nietzsche's Birth of Tregedy as Cultural Criticism." Nietzsche- Studien 4 (1975). Morgan, George A. What Nietzsche Means. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Mugge, M. A. Friedrich Nietzsche. London: T. Fischer Unwin, 1914. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. trans. R. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1969. Stern,J. P. Friedrich Nietzsche. Kingsport: Kingsport, 1978. Taylor, Ronald. Richard Wagner; his Life, Art and Thought. London: P. Elek, 1979. Wolf, A. The Philosophy of Nietzcshe. London: Constable, 1915.