Name: Nietzsche for Beginners
ISBN: 9781874166634

Laurence Gane

Kitty Chan

Traces the life of the philosopher in illustrations, examines his major ideas, and introduces the individuals who influenced his work.

Nietzsche for Beginners

Tim Pendry

This book is part of a series of graphic accounts of significant modern philosophers and ideas. The original idea behind the series was that you could educate through a combination of image and crisp short summaries of the life and history of complicated people and concepts. This is both absurd and helpful. None of these books (largely produced in the post-modern fervour of the 1990s) can do more than skim the surface of a subject. Ideas can be so foreshortened that they are meaningless to the uneducated subject. The graphics are often crude but they serve their purpose, only rarely adding to the obscurities instead of enlightening us. On the other hand, they offer two hours (approximately) of comic book summary of the main tenets of a thinker or movement with valuable pointers to further reading or study. They are very useful and entertaining in that context. To a great extent, they have been superseded by the internet. Wikipedia and a basic Google search can deliver similar short reliable summaries with links at the click of a mouse but they still have their role in opening up the minds of many people who would never otherwise come up against these ideas. Personally, I am a great admirer of Nietzsche who, though not flawless, provided us with some very fundamental insights into human psychology and engaged deeply with some of the toughest metaphysical and other philosophical problems encountered in Western philosophy. We have long since left Marx and Freud behind, largely because of the excesses of their followers, but we have scarcely touched the surface of Nietzsche's contribution to thought even if his analyses may never be fully acceptable in 'polite society'. He is the most inconvenient of philosophers. There is no point in summarising a summary account of his life and thinking. I have my own theory of his 'madness' (about which, of course, doubts have been raised) so if you are not interested in this, do not read on and just make a judgement on the book on the basis of your need. The probability is of a serious nervous breakdown and mental instability but it strikes me that it is not accidental that it was triggered by a horse being beaten by a man in public. Nietzsche's thought derived in part from his absolute refusal to compromise in trying to understand the reality of 'herd' behaviour (in effect, social psychology) and in communicating his findings about that behaviour to a world that, by his own analysis, had too much at stake in seeing the bones beneath the skin. It was not a truly free society - an intellectual elite acted as a thin veneer of public morality and of ideology within a system that remained fundamentally brutal in its demands for service from its members. The masters, indeed, had become slaves to their slaves in order to maintain order, both social and cultural. Nietzsche was the liberationist of the individual against this system but was quite definitely one without much of an understanding of the components of the 'herd' outside his class. He thought that a man of the elite (he is ambiguous about women) could liberate himself from the obligations imposed by the collective from below without perhaps understanding that the elite had a great deal of material interest in creating this system of self-policing in a complex industrial society. Unlike Marx, Nietzsche clearly did not understand how industrial society was different from the pagan world of the past. Within such a bourgeois culture, faced with a threat from within their own community, people like Nietzsche are handled not through attack but through a policy of isolation - as inconvenient and 'not to the point'. This how the intelligentsia operates in any case, through systematic exclusion of those who do not accept the prevailing ideology. I am sure that many fine minds, with perhaps similar if much less developed ideas, have languished in obscurity unable, without leisure, to record their thinking, even in the lower ranks of bourgeois Germany. Nietzsche was both lucky and unlucky in living at the cusp of a new age. On the one hand, there was sufficient freedom from cultural authority to enable free expression. On the other, there was an insufficient plurality of cultural communications for that free expression, at least in his life time, that might counter the dead weight of the existing German elite. Part of Nietzsche's famous breach with Wagner derived from anger at the great artist's slow and steady absorption into this dominant culture rather than challenge it with a new 'pagan' affirmation of life. Wagner abandoned the Nibelungenlied for Parzifal. Nietzsche can occasionally sound as if he is pessimistic in this context (which is certainly the view of most persons faced with the grim Doctrine of the Eternal Return) but, in fact, his entire work cannot be understood except as an attempt to affirm life in the face of the much grimmer pessimism of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer's miserabilism might be regarded as the natural thinking response to the flummery of Christian duty but one that, as in Wagner's case, equally permitted submission to its demands. Amongst the elaborate lies we weave to keep ourselves 'sane', Wagner appeared to choose Schopenhauerian negation and Nietzsche never forgave him for this. Nietzsche used up vasts amount of psychic energy in seeking out his own 'truth' (he never accepted that there could be a 'Truth') and his 'truth', which was based on a rigorous stripping away of layers of social illusion and convenient irrationalities (including the illusion of rationality itself), could only have value either to someone in a similar position to him (a bourgeois mind with a mission) or to a society that felt itself free to experiment with freedom. Nietzsche took his vision, often writing his books in a matter of days after months of cogitation, and laid it out remorselessly to his (then) non-readers in a drive for self-exploration that a critic might consider as neurotic in itself. His thinking was a necessity, not a desire, and the resultant body of work, obscure though it may be in places, is one of the greatest creative uses of the mind in human history. It proved a revolution in thinking that spread first amongst intellectuals overseas, then returned to Germany in a bastardised form (irrelevant to all those truly interested in the thought). Once purged of its more absurd followers, bit ecame a central source for nearly all modern continental philosophy and for a critique of power that (in my view) has now become truly salient in the social conditions arising from rapid change in the technology of communications. The point is that Nietzsche described the social world more accurately than any preceding philosopher and placed it in a metaphysical context. His observations now seem in closest accord with the dark findings of the cognitive scientists and the social psychologists about how we humans actually operate and command the world. Many Enlightenment-trained intellectuals will run around like frightened rabbits and then sink into a gloom at Milgram's experiments or the Holocaust as if their thinking will change anything about these things. Nietzsche would not have been surprised in either case for it is just how he saw that the 'herd' operates and the educated elite responds. Even now, Western liberal thinking has still not come to terms with the death of Reason as substitute for Revelation and is turning to 'nudge' as its last desperate fling at dealing with inconvenient truths. Where he was lucky in his legacy is precisely in not being acceptable too soon. Marx saw Marxism boom and bust as it seized power, perverted power and then died because Marx's undoubted insights were hobbled by Engels' scientific materialism. Freud was to have a similar problem with Freudians who became sucked, like Marxists, into complex and fixed ideologies of mind that soon came unstuck, in a perverse reversal of what happened to Marxism, by not being scientific enough! Nietzche, on the other hand, was followed initially by maniacs who seriously perverted his message (the malign racial nationalism of his sister and of German radical nationalists) but who did this to such a ridiculous degree that his work not merely survived but emerged strengthened. 'For what does not kill, strengthens' in his often quoted aphorism. Nietzsche's approach to life survives precisely because it is individualistic and anti-ideological. It cannot be systematised like Marxism yet it embodies its critique of Reason in the terms of reasoning itself. It out-reasons Reason and brilliantly and entertainingly at that. This will soon bring us back to the flogged horse, so be patient. Because the flaw in Nietzsche's thinking arises from the conditions in which he did his thinking. You must imagine a man isolated but following the logic of his own thought in a way that others might have considered 'mad' well before his diagnosed 'madness'. Yet the brilliance and power of reasoning and determination could not permit such a judgement reasonably while he still thought and wrote. However, this man may have been hard on the human race's capacity for illusion but he was also hard on himself. He knew the logic of the situation. He was seeing into the heart of the human condition. Evolution must eventually see humanity negate itself completely in its illusions (as many post-modern French thinkers seem to suggest is happening) or 'become' something else. This latter is the real 'trans-human' message behind the 'ubermensch', an individual transformation that evolves into a species-transformation or else sees humanity as an evolutionary dead end for humanity as a whole. Some may now expect the 'ubermensch' to be found in the world of artificial intelligence, raising the interesting conundrum of which sort of negation we might choose in the long run - spiritual or physical. Whether he saw himself as an 'ubermensch' is unclear. It is unlikely. He was a prophet of the new type like his Zarathustra, a man crying 'God is dead' in a world that thought him 'mad'. And so we come to his fundamental flaw. He rightly castigated 'compassion'. He was right to do so in two senses. First, as the psychic vampirism of the liberal or Christian or progressive with power in hand whose 'compassion' is a form of power relation, denying the rights of the victim to be anything other than a victim. Second, in the Buddhist sense, of a distanced 'compassion' for the world, a 'compassion' which is the negation of existence, a refusal to engage in life. In his determination to call the tune on the 'slave mentality' and the life-negating aspects of these two types of compassion, which are really forms of self-centred victimisation of others and of oneself respectively, he hardened himself and he forgot a third form of compassion. There was no energy left for this compassion and no insight into the self to see its necessity. This is the third form of compassion, one that arises from the Will to Power where another or others becomes existentially chosen, without illusion, to become part of oneself yet with respect for their own autonomy. It is, in short, 'love'. Poor Nietzsche never seems to have had the chance to experience this sense of worlds entwined and of the interconnection between equals that goes far beyond the nonsense of modern romanticism. In his one big blind spot, he did not understand just how much his Will to Power was bound up with the libido (where we are indebted to Freud in raising its presence as unconscious drive). This is the energy designed to acquire 'more' and make oneself whole - being social animals, this includes relations with others. All relations with others are relations of power but, at a certain point, we can decide ourselves whether they are relations of power that are inherited, especially inherited by our slavish internal needs created by society for society (as in Christian cultural repression), or they are relations of power that we create and in which our true nature is best expressed by having relations of power that are calibrated to be as equal as possible. Why? Because that is how we get our greatest pleasure, conversing within an aristocracy of equals (not materially but existentially). By the time of his madness, Nietzsche will have been very isolated and lonely. There was no love in his life. No interconnection. Certainly no aristocracy of existential equals. Nor could he expect such an aristocracy to emerge in his life time - indeed, one may be emerging only now with new forms of communication. When he saw that horse beaten (I surmise), he saw not merely himself beaten but the raw misery of a world in which one man may speak the truth of what is to come and yet know that no-one will understand until he is long dead (if at all). Worse, by the doctrine of the eternal return, his life would be an eternal round of such existential lonelinesses. This does not negate his affirmation of life but his surge of compassion for that horse is a rising up of compassion for a humanity that does not 'get it' and for himself as the person who does and is before his time. Given everything that had gone before, his only 'choice' is an assumed or actual madness. In a parody of the Christian message which he excoriated mercilessly, Nietzsche is 'crucified' on the cross of his own humanity.

Nietzsche for Beginners

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