#17 Nietzsche – Why I am So Wise

What more appropriate title could there be for marking the half-way mark for Man versus Ideas? Fifty books down, fifty to go. Not to mention all twenty books in series one put into the philosophical out-tray!

I’m clearly nowhere near as wise as Nietzsche, though. Ecce Homo, the first book in this collection, has chapter titles headed “Why I am so wise”, “Why I am so clever”, “Why I write such good books” and “Why I am destiny”. The whole of the book is littered with phrases like

“To have understood, that is to say experienced, six sentences of [my Zarathustra] would raise one to a higher level of mortals than ‘modern’ man could attain to.”

All of which means I don’t quite accept Nietzsche’s claim that “At no moment in my life can I be shown to have adopted an arrogant or pathetic posture.”

The last thing I feel like after reading this is wise. ‘Why I am So Baffled’ would have fit me much better. I tried to find out a little more. There seems to be a respectable body of opinion that says it’s a very cleverly written double-bluff, written as a clever verbal game to undercut other genre of philosophical self-expression. This sounds to me like no one else gets it either, but given that they’re professor emeritus of imperial fashion, they’re not going to be the ones to call out the emperor’s new clothes. The fact that Nietzsche went irrevocably mad with syphilis less than a year later may also explain something.

Thankfully, there is some material in the rest of the volume which gives something of Nietzsche’s general philosophy (instead of the way in which he applied it to himself). In ‘The Twilight of the Idols’ he explores four ‘great errors’:

• Confusing cause with consequence
• Imposing a false causality
• Imagining false causes for events
• Ascribing free will to human action

Nietzsche is particularly interested in how this relates to ideas of morality. A man follows a religious code, and as a result commits good acts, but it does not follow that it was the code that caused the good. Instead, the two really come from a common source – the underlying nature of the individual. Whatever that nature demands will ultimately be expressed, and that is totally outside of a man’s control. As a consequence of this, it is a nonsense to praise or criticise an individual for the way they act.

“No one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself… No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives. The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be.”

This also leaves me a little confused, as I’d always thought Nietzsche’s great contribution to philosophy was the will to power – the idea that if we want to do something, and if we can, then no further moral justification is necessary. This would seem to hinge on there being a free will in the first place. And certainly, in the rest of this book Nietzsche stresses the importance of expressing individuality in the face of the herd.

“And if your hardness will not flash and cut and cut to pieces: how can you, one day – create with me?”

I think I’ll have to withhold conclusions until we get to the other volume of Nietzsche in the series. Or, to put it another way, until I’m a little more wise.