How to Never Live Like Nietzsche, According to Nietzsche: An Essay
Friedrich Nietzsche is proof that morality does not guarantee salvation, genius does not incur verity, and that even understanding pain does not mean escaping it. On January 3, 1889, after writing fifteen books on various metaphysical and existential inquiries, Nietzsche would suffer a breakdown, after which, he never wrote another word. Why? He had been walking in the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Italy when he witnessed the beating of a horse, and just after throwing his arms around the neck in an attempt to protect the animal, he collapsed (“The True”). Although probably due to third-stage syphilis rather than ironic divine intervention (Magnus), this last conscious act of the infamous philosopher is a metaphor for his life: while attempting to observe pain, he practiced it instead. Is it possible for us, students of the master, to understand life as deeply as he did but avoid the pain that it induces, or is suffering necessary to understand the abjectness, as well as pleasures, of life? Nietzsche argued that Greek theater provides the answer.
Nietzsche was born in 1844 Prussia but would later serve in the Franco-Prussian War resulting in the unification of Germany. He was of the best cavalry riders, predicted to reach captain rank, but instead tore two muscles when mounting a horse, leaving him a convalescent for months, unable to walk. He would also contract dysentery and diphtheria while tending to the sick, leaving him perennially sick (Magnus). Before the war, he had been an excellent student and after his appointment would become a professor at the University of Basel at only age twenty four, of which he remains one of “the youngest of the tenured Classics professors on record” (Eternalised). Despite this accomplishment however, his professional work would receive relatively little reception during his lifetime, and between his father’s death, when Nietzsche was four, and his contentious relationship with his anti-semetic sister (Radeska), his life was quite austere. His only attempted romantic encounter, with Lou Andreas Salome, ended in his creation of the unfortunate montage below (Nietzsche, Friedrich), depicting this failed romance within a life that was as dramatic as it was tragic — a modern Greek production.
Nietzche experienced a great deal of pain in his life, and it is assumed he created a philosophy to compensate, looking to Greek logic and tragedy to build his argument. Norman Melchert, author of The Great Conversation, explains there are three main Greek figures who influenced his thinking: Silenus, deity of the forest; Apollo, deity of order and knowledge; and Dionysus, god of wine. Converging these symbols with the assumption of coeval philosopher Schopenhauer, Nietzsche would form the opinion that “the world of our experience is merely appearance, not reality” (Melchert). That is, what is does not exist in physical form — only the perceptions of our individual false narratives, specifically narratives attempting to avoid suffering. “Individual consciousness,” Melchert advocates, “is drowned in a sea of feelings.” So, employing this assumption, we must first turn to the concept of Silenus’s Wisdom.
Nietzsche argued that the best state is the impossible one of never having been born, “to be nothing,” as he wrote in The Birth of Tragedy, although the second best thing would be “to die soon” (Nietzsche, The). While bleak, this is where Nietzsche drew a despairing, yet crucial conclusion: that art is a way of dying, of living forever, with pain, through gratification. Much like Freud in his trinity of Id, impulse; Superego, morality; and Ego, a compromise between the two, the acting state (Evans); Nietzsche, made a distinction between the way we do experience our pain and the optimal way to experience pain using the god of order and art, Apollo, and the god of indulgence and errantness, Dionysus. We are caught between opposing forces of creative energy in life, between the two powers of the gods. In this way Nietzche was an aesthetic, or concerned with the composition and artistic value of life. We live in drunkenness, we experience the sober, we awake with a hangover — this is the human dilemma, as we live in a world of irrational pain. This is, afterall, what most philosophers search to find: why a force endowed us with the facilities to feel pain, and what is the meaning of pain. Humanness means having been born and forced to live in inhuman conditions, and Nietzsche took a practical, pessimistic approach by not attempting to escape pain, but to look at it, and wonder how to suffer comfortably as it is an indelible quality of life.
One of the formative dogmas of man is the story of Christ, how He suffered for our sins, and how we subsequently suffer for the pain we caused him; we must be subject to abjectness, to misery, because as loyal martyrs in religious war, brave gladiators in the colosseum, unfortunate victims in killer documentaries, we live for certain ideals we will never quite reach, and for people we will never quite know. I suppose Nietzsche viewed a sublimeness in pain, as he believes humans as a species do, that he admires philosophical self-mutilation because he believes it helps us to construct meaning from irrational anguish. For instance, why has blood-sport been a ubiquitous aspect of human culture for so long? Are humans trying to capitalize on an experience that seems immutable in life? Is there something true in pain we want to reveal? Maybe we have even evolved with a bit of taste for pain as well because as a constant humans have learned to assimilate into it. However, it should be noted the former symbolic reference to Christ would not please Nietzsche, as he believed that religion was just another way to ignore suffering in life, famously denouncing alcohol and Christianity together because he believed it is a tendency to use them to drown sorrows (Wolters).
Despite a possible and apparent want for it though, humans have evolved to feel adverse to pain. For example, it is considered unethical to perform surgery without giving patients anesthesia, or to burn people with fire. But oddly, pain helps people to live in that it tells the body what is harmful. It keeps people alive, in this sense. Humans feel pain because we want to live, possibly, and because as my brother says, “Life is sometimes worth a bit more than happiness.” Although, while people will endure tribulations to simply live in the first place, they will fight to live their version of success, in ways they will not to live a passive existence. I would argue that people do not live for the sake of pain or for pleasure, but rather meaning, which those concepts only help to augment or diminish. Neither is an end, but a receptor that is a sign of what a person wants or needs.
Nietzsche argued more unilaterally, however. It seems that his quintessential question is how to view pain in our lives without torturing the self directly, and he answers with the word art. The important fact when thinking of Nietzsche’s interpretation of Greek plays is that when they were originally performed, there were no actors, just a chorus reciting a story (Melchert). However, Nietzsche did not view what the chorus says as a story, rather stating that “The drama,” Melchert explains, “Is in the dream of the chorus.” To which he will then comment, “A play, after all, is rather like a dream isn’t it? […] We ourselves are a dream — a dream of the will” (Melchert). There is no divine force that tells us living is moral in Nietzsche’s philosophy. We are the gods, as well as the adherents, and we want to keep watching as if our lives were just a play, as if saying, “This is a dream! I want to dream on!” (Melchert). Maybe he believes that because we are in this dream, a perception of reality, in drunkenness, pain is useful because it awakens us to life.
In the famous Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, one of Nietzsche’s studies, we see “the destruction of individuals’’ (Melchert). But this is too simplistic of an interpretation. Bad things happen to Oedipus, but this is not where his sorrow comes from. It comes from the first fact that his father chose to ignore prophecy, and that Oedipus himself repeats this mistake of choosing ignorance over reality. He blinds himself rather than accept his eventual circumstances, and this is where Nietzsche tells us that we are only in true despair when the world we create, choose to live in, is one of deceit. Choosing to not see our own pain is the greatest trauma — “Nietzsche thinks there are two pessimisms: a pessimism of weakness and a pessimism of strength” (Melchert). The Great Conversation will go on to say the former is of a Buddist quality, where one seeks to escape pain, and on the other side is the Greeks, who rather choose “joyous affirmation in the face of terror” (Melchert). Pain is inevitable, almost as cliche as Henry David Thorou’s assertion that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (Henry David Thoreau). But our tragic heros will not, because they are not tragic because their stories end in pain, but because throughout the story, the audience seeks a weakness, a resistance to embrace pain and transform it into Melchert’s “pessimism of strength.”
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Henry David Thoreau. Walden. London Vintage, 9 Aug. 1854.
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