#49 Friedrich Nietzsche – Man Alone with Himself

After my last encounter with Nietzsche, I didn’t look forward to this book. It was therefore a pleasant surprise to find out that, before the syphilis devoured his brain, Nietzsche was observant, witty, lyrical and incisive. Plus, best of all, he didn’t like young people.

“Bad tempered thought: People are like piles of charcoal in the woods. Only when young people have stopped glowing and carbonised, as charcoal does, do they become useful. As long as they smoulder and smoke they are perhaps more interesting, but useless and all too often troublesome.”

Nietzsche is a prophet of solitude, with an inbuilt distaste for the committed believers of the world. Unfortunately for him, the Victorian age was crawling with them – believers in god, or progress, or wealth, or labour or race or art or anything that seemed to offer the promise of some greater purpose to life. Which leaves Nietzsche with a lot of targets for his cynical asides.

“Idealists’ delusion: All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are significantly better than the other causes in the world; they do not believe that if their cause is to flourish at all, it requires exactly the same foul-smelling manure that all other human undertakings require.”

He notes that the champions of truth are a lot harder to find when the truth is boring.* That it tends to be our character that picks our beliefs rather than our beliefs that form our character. And that only a fool keeps a promise made solely from passion when that passion ceases to apply. So if you happen to be a firm believer in something, or just more generally happen to be under the age of 21, it’s best to stay out of Nietzsche’s way.

(Not that the over-21s are exempt. One particularly interesting passage discusses the person who turns against their youth, who distrusts all their feelings, sets their enthusiasms round with doubts and questions the value of a good conscience. This may all be a reaction against youth, he says, but you’ll look back on it as being just another stage of your youth. I’ll let you know if that turns out to be true.)

Towards the end of the book, in material taken from his later work, Nietzsche starts making the case for a different, more insular view of the world. Solitude becomes his aim – the secret citadel mentioned in the extract on the cover. It is only by being alone that the superior being can preserve what is special in him.

Wanting to agree with the mass is a sign of poor taste if nothing else. After all, have you seen the kind of people in the masses these days?

“Then study of the average human being … this constitutes a necessary part of the life of every philosopher, perhaps the most unpleasant and malodorous part and the part most full of disappointments.”

If you write the kind of book that everyone agrees with, the “smell of petty people clings to them.”

This is more than just name-calling: what Nietzsche is really doing is rejecting the ideas of universalism. Most western thinkers try to make rules for explaining wider life, whereas Nietzsche says quite clearly that he does not care for the rest of them. What interest has he in this filthy mass of shambling halfwits? The man of greatness asserts his greatness by leaving them, not by saving them.**

That means an end to the conscience and a total disregard for the idea of making the lives of others better. Those so-called free-thinkers who want to right the world are a positive menace and should be shunned.

“Eloquent and tirelessly scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its ‘modern ideas’, men without solitude one and all … good clumsy fellows who, while they cannot be denied courage and moral respectability, are unfree and ludicrously superficial … their two most oft-recited doctrines and ditties are ‘equality of rights’ and ‘sympathy for all that suffers’ – and suffering itself they take for something that has to be abolished.”

By contrast, Nietzsche is absolutely fine with the idea of making people’s lives worse, since he thinks this is what will bring out the powers of innovation and resilience in the worthwhile man.*** Whatever builds his will to power, his ability to take control for himself, has to be seen as a good thing. The world needs to be run to create the conditions for personal greatness, not general mediocrity.

Philosophically speaking, it’s a surprisingly robust position. If you want to say the world is best run to make people interesting, you want that world to be shocking and challenging. You probably aren’t too fussed about when the unfortunate or the unimportant are crushed in the process. It’s only in social terms where the mind rebels – that troublesome conscience and empathy that Nietzsche says are holding us back. But then, I’m not quite willing to give those up as truly futile…

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*Something that any civil servant can tell you for nothing

**Curiously, while this is radical and daring in the western tradition, this makes him a very good fit with some of the Taoist thinkers I’ve encountered in this series.

***I use the word ‘man’ consciously. I can’t quite think that Nietzsche means the ubermensch to be gender-neutral, however unfair that feels.