Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography

Becoming Zarathustra
by Thomas Nagel

Post date: 01.03.02
Issue date: 01.14.02

[Review of] Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Rüdiger Safranski translated by Shelley Frisch (W.W. Norton)

"A small minority have the leisure to devote themselves systematically to understanding life and the world: scientists, historians, and thinkers. Others, seeing that there is much that is wrong with the world, spend their lives trying to change it for the better, and not just for themselves. Still others, creative artists, try to add to the world wonders that do not yet exist. Friedrich Nietzsche's conception of his own task, the task of the true philosopher, was closest to the last of these--not merely to understand the world or to change it, but to create something new. And the field of his creation was himself."

"Nietzsche's assault on the familiar is more radical even than Descartes's skepticism. ... knowledge is not the main point. The point is to achieve a different kind of existence: to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is ... [the book] concentrates on ... Nietzsche's inner life and his self-transformation through thought and writing. ... a book about what was really important to Nietzsche: the largely solitary attempt to live up to the recognition that existence is something tremendous. ... [the author] does not give special emphasis to the topics that are of most interest to contemporary academic philosophy--truth, objectivity, skepticism about morality."

" ... the spreading modern recognition that religion was a human creation rather than a transcendent truth--that "God is dead," in his memorable phrase--Nietzsche looked for something to replace it  ... music had the power to bring him into direct contact with reality--that the experience of music brought something deeper than words and rational understanding could provide. No distance or observation or description separates us from music. ... Richard Strauss's Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 2001: A Space Odyssey to evoke the birth of human consciousness. Nietzsche's first hope, that music combined with a new and un-Christian mythology would allow us to connect with the deeper reality not expressed in modern or scientific discourse ... The ancient Greeks ... [had] in their art a detached or Apollonian grasp of the world existed side by side with the conflicting, passionate, Dionysian force of unreflective being. Apollo was the god of clarity and form, Dionysus the god of orgiastic ecstasy. Non-rational and potentially destructive feeling contained by, but always threatening to burst the bounds of, self-reflective rational control and understanding: this was the drama of human life, raised to a high level in Greek tragedy. But the subordination of art by the triumph of reason had led in the modern world to a loss of contact with the Dionysian sources of life ... the need remained to bring out the Dionysian forces without taming them, and this was Nietzsche's artistic and philosophical project for the rest of his short productive life. ...  it meant calling into question morality, whose sources were very poorly understood--asking for the significance of morality ... What we need, he said, is not the courage of our convictions, but the courage for an attack on our convictions."

" ... the most important strain in his thought, I believe, was suspicion of the authority exercised by collective and supposedly objective or rational norms and concepts over the individual perspectives and drives at the core of life. And his characteristic method of calling that authority into question was to unmask the claim of objectivity and impersonality as itself the expression of an individualized drive--in the most general terms, the will to power, power over the world and over others. The conflict of perspectives and competing wills that is the true reality is obscured and flattened out by the social imposition of a common standpoint, in language, thought, morality, and politics ... these ruling ideas ... 'The battle in morality boils down to the power of definition. It is ultimately a question of who allows himself to be judged by whom.'"

"He regarded modern morality, which speaks with the voice of the community or even of humanity as a whole, as particularly dangerous, because it requires suppression of the cruelty and the recklessness that distinguish the strong individual. The height of self- realization cannot be reached by someone who is too concerned with the reactions of others, or with his effects on them. There is a fundamental conflict between the pursuit of individual creativity and perfection and the claims of the general welfare. ... Nietzsche was not a democrat. ... he defended slavery as a condition of the possibility of great cultural achievement by the few, as in ancient Athens. And he defended its modern counterpart, the economic oppression of the masses, for the same reason. ... Equality ... would inevitably push everything down to the lowest common denominator, that of the "democratic herd animal." Life, he insisted, is tragic; it is necessary to choose between justice and aesthetic perfection."

" ... the Übermensch ... is a possible successor to man, self- created by bringing to consciousness all the strong and contradictory forces that lie beneath the human surface, acknowledging the omnipresence of the will to power, and re-valuing all existing values, through the assessment of their genealogies, from the perspective of this enlarged acceptance of life. It is doubtful that anything like morality would survive for such a creature ... "

" ... final element ... the puzzling idea of eternal recurrence. ... the insight that the entire history of the universe, including his own life, had already happened an infinite number of times and would repeat itself infinitely into the future. ... provided him with a form of sanctification of life without religion, for it made every moment of life eternal. The past has not ceased to exist, and the present is not vanishing as we live through it. Every moment of our being is real forever. And the Übermensch is the being whose capacity for self-affirmation will enable him to rejoice at this thought."

" ... [Nietzsche] is sometimes regarded as a destroyer of the idea of truth and a prophet of postmodernism, though it is clear that he utterly rejected the notion that all perspectives are equal--and that he had at the least a robust sense of falsehood, which is difficult to separate from some conception of truth. ... The potentially anarchic will of the individual, which provides the heat of life, need not be destroyed by the acceptance of norms of justice and impartiality that incorporate the combined viewpoints of many individuals and attempt to reconcile them. An egalitarian morality need not crush individual freedom and creativity; it can be liberal, thus transcending the purchase of the freedom of the few at the price of the slavery of the many. This, too--the desire to live on mutually acceptable terms with our fellow humans--is a deep part of us; and here I would say that Kant had more self- understanding than Nietzsche, who felt the point of view of the other as an invasion from without. [the Author] ends with the image of Caspar David Friedrich's painting The Monk by the Sea: the individual in the face of immensity. 'Kant,' he says, 'had asked whether we ought to leave the terra firma of reason and venture out into the open sea of the unknown. Kant had advocated remaining here. Nietzsche, however, ventured out.' We can be grateful for what he found on the journey, and recognize that he invented new forms of self-examination that are now common property. At the same time, we should distrust as signs of weakness his inflated heroics of rebellion, pitiless cruelty, and daring in the face of the abyss. And this is as it should be, for Nietzsche did not attempt to produce a system fully defended against attack, but rather a method of attack that would work even against himself." ... [more]