Book Reviews
Editorial: Nietzsche in Five Minutes
There are as many different Nietzsches as there are scholars. It's possible that you believe that Friedrich Nietzsche imagined the death of God and wrote of an overman able to regard morality as unnecessary. Or maybe you believe that Nietzsche was a brilliant and scientifically-minded man who created an entirely new and revolutionary way of expressing thought in what he saw as a post-religious fashion, and that because of that new method of writing, (and the nefarious re-intepretations of his life and work, at the hands of his Nazi sister,) he was almost entirely misunderstood, misinterpreted and has been largely misrepresented ever since. Or, then again, maybe you believe that Nietzsche has been misunderstood quite innocently, because Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche genuinely didn't understand her brother's work and published some of Friedrich's rough and disorganised notes, innocently, mistakenly and as a Part One of The Will to Power. And that that simple editorial mistake has helped to give Nietzsche the not entirely undeserved reputation for being both brilliant and thoroughly incomprehensible both at the same time! Of course the reason why that reputation isn't entirely undeserved is because for much of the time Nietzsche deliberately wrote cryptic aphorisms and delighted in being misunderstood. That's a subject we'll return to later.
Before we go any further, it's important to ask one simple question: Is it always impossible to understand a single word that Nietzsche says? The simple answer to this question is no. It's not always impossible, no. There were occasions when Nietzsche wrote in plain German! Anybody who has read both Nietzsche Contra Wagner and The Wanderer and His Shadow will find the language that he uses is utterly different in each text. That's because the author's purpose is utterly different in each text. In the second he is happy to write things like: "The modern Diogenes. Before one seeks men one must have found the lantern. Will it have to be the lantern of the cynic?" which clearly needs to be interpreted. (And he has shown elsewhere how he feels about peoples' interpretations.) But, by contrast, in the first Nietzsche beats out his message reapeatedly. He doesn't want to be misunderstood. He's apologising for himself and some of his unsavory friendships. He says: "Read consecutively, they will leave no doubt either about Richard Wagner or about me: we are antipodes...since Wagner had moved to Germany, he had condescended step by step to everything I despise, even to anti-Semitism..." Nietzsche is wrong, of course, Wagner was always a horrible anti-semite. And he was always aware of it. His friendship with Paul Ree, who was Jewish, acts as a barometer in the measurement of the ebb and flow of Nietzsche's generous and Wagner's antipathetic feelings. There is no single opaque, or plain, use of Nietzsche's German. He was infinitely capable of alternating between those two, and other, styles. And he did so when it suited him. Nietzsche, sometimes wrote in a turgid and opaque style because he wanted to write that way. Often he did not.
Regardless of what you believe about him, you'll probably be prepared to admit that much of the confusion about what Nietzsche stood for, if indeed he stood for any one thing in particular, derives from the countless interpretations of his Ubermensche, or overman. Nietzsche himself was all too aware of the confusion that this term caused his readers. But he gives you the undoubted sense that this confusion was more of a source of merriment to him than a source of concern. Perhaps if he had been more concerned with clarifying his terms and less with denigrating great numbers of his readers, we wounldn't be in so much doubt about what he really did mean. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche delights in telling us that he shocked a reader, who he does not identify, by telling him that Caesar Borgia more resembles his superman than Parsifal, (Sir Percival, King Arthur's knight, from Wagner's eponymous opera.) And for those unfamiliar with Borgia's murderous exploits, he truly represents the bloodthirsty height of Renaissance amoraily! It has often been alleged that Neitzsche meant his Ubermensche to represent no such inhuman man-beast. And modern tradition dictates that it's largely the fault of first George Bernard Shaw, and later Thomas Common who both translated Ubermensche as superman. America's most eminent Nietzsche scholar, Walter Kaufmann, lambasts both of these translations for neglecting nuances in the German word Uber. According to Kaufmann the word should be translated as overman and not superman. But, regardless of bad translations, when, between Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo, and The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche manages to equate his overman to Dionysus, Caesar Borgia and Napoleon, or, to be more faithful, to an inspecific synthesis of all three of them. So, who, or perhaps more relevantly, what precisely was the Ubermensche? Nietzsche's referring to himself both as `the most terrible human being that there has ever been, and the first immoralist,' his slavish devotion to the egotistical, virolently, anti-semitic, tyranical composer Wagner and to that philosopher of abject mysery, Arthur Schopenhauer, are a cause of much confusion. As has been pointed out, Nietzsche tried, somewhat belatedly after Wagner's death, to rewrite the flawed composer out of his own personal history. Although Nietzsche's denial of Wagner would probably never have worked, people would not have forgotten that he dedicated his first work, The Birth of Tragedy, to Wagner, or that he was so effusive in his praise of him to friends and relatives in his letters. His subsequent rejection of Wagner would undoubtably have been much more successful than it was if his sister Elizabeth hadn't made such a determined effort to hitch the now runaway Nietzsche bandwagon firmly to the Nazi cause. What Elizabeth did rendered her brother's protestations pale by comparison and largely irrelevant. Even if Nietzsche himself wasn't a raving, homophobic, anti-semitic, his work was being used to promote people and causes who were all of those things. And, being dead, there wasn't anything that could save him, or his reputation, from it.
So, where does that leave us? How can we believe that a man so famous for doing something that in fact he never did, representing the Greater Germanic Ideal, and yet, who glorified in the notion of amorality, was leaving us a message that can really be described as useful or meaningful in any way? What did he want us to do with the notion of his Ubermensche, even supposing that we could understand what that being consisted of? Well, firstly, if we had time, we would separate the god Dionysus from the other two figures which Nietzsche explained made up central parts of the Ubermensche's character, namely Napoleon and Ceasar Borgia, since the latter pair were real historical figures. And then we would introduce Nietzsche's existential contrast between, roughly speaking, the god Apollo, representative of all things rational and structured, and the god, Dionysus, representative of all things wild, disordered and chaotic. But, since we haven't, we won't. What we'll do instead is admit that we don't really know who Nietzsche's Ubermensche really was. And, we'll suspect that neither did he. If you're a great lover of order and structure this will concern and distress you. And, if you're more Dionysian in character, you'll be more than satisfied with that as an explanation!
It wasn't Nietzsche himself who said that God is dead, in The Gay Science, but a madman who he had invented. And, further more, we already know that Nietzsche himself had given up his own theological studies in 1864 when a schism in his faculty caused him and a number of other students to leave the university of Bonn and move to Leipzig, and we also know that he delighted in attacking Christianity, the devotion to which which Nietzsche wrote had made the German people stupid. Nietzsche was pretty liberal with his stupidity labels. According to him a large part of his readership was stupid, the Christian German people were stupid and so too was mankind in any sort of group or society. And worst of all were the lackeys who worshipped Wagner and his Bayreuth Festival, as Neitzsche himself now liked to forget that he himself had done. And, as we've already seen, rather than calling himself stupid for having been so devoted to Wagner, he pretends that the composer's character had changed into something horrible, when in reality Richard Wagner had always been horrible. And so, eventually, Nietzsche retired to a mountain cabin to write autobiographical chapters with names like: Why Am I so Wise? Why Do I Write Such Great Books? Having posed these rather presumptuous questions he would then sit down and write answers to them.
There is no single opaque, or plain, use of Nietzsche's German. He was infinitely capable of alternating between those two, and other, styles. And he did so when it suited him. Nietzsche, sometimes wrote in a turgid and opaque style because he wanted to write that way. Often he did not. I set out to find Nietzsche and all I've done is jot down a long list of his attributes. I don't think I'm any closer to discovering who Nietzsche was than anybody else has ever been and that includes his sister, Wagner and several of his greatest friends, whom he loved so to fall out of love with. In a tremendous act of spite, Richard Wagner once told one of his opera audiences that Nietzsche's blindness was caused by compulsive masterbation. I may not have spent as many Christmases with him as the great German composer had done. But even I can tell that that wasn't a very good character representation. Unlike Wagner, I think I'll describe him as somebody, often Quixotic in his self-reflections, who wrote a large body of work, some of it poetic, some analytical, some little more than a heap of scribbles, and who was used tirelessly by others to suit their own purposes. And the sum of all this is that, if you're a casual Neitzsche reader you'll do well to come away with a sense of the man at all. But If, like Walter Kaufmann, you're a natural German speaker, and prepared to spend a lifetime analysing his work, you'll probably emmerge with an analysis of the man that's far nearer to the man's character than most people ever get close to.
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