Authors: William H. Gass
Nevertheless, these numerous hilarities (and they need only be held up to view, as Bouvard and Pécuchet do in Flaubert’s magnificent annihilation, to provoke the profoundest and saddest laughter) have not prevented great civilizations from espousing them; from, in fact, being shaped and helped to their heights by
them, whether Greek or Persian, Hebrew or Roman, Aztec or Mayan, Chinese or Yankee. In short, reality, whatever it is beyond our representations, does not compel anyone to a particular form of existence, or a particular set of values, the way it forces ants into hills, bees into hives, or baboons into their colonies. There is certainly no natural morality, in that sense, no true way of life.
It does not follow from this relativist premise that all modes of existence are equally okay. Some are a whole lot better than others, but that judgment cannot rest on any factual foundation, but on concepts like “freedom,” “fairness,” “form,” and “fulfillment.”
The Greek sophists had already seen that if virtue alters, like the weather does, from Athens to Sparta, then the truly fortunate are those who control the currents and can make it rain in the mountains and snow on the plains as they prefer. Nor are constitutions, traditions, and legislative assemblies the only forces, or priests and politicians the sole controllers. Weak of body and of intermittent mind, Nietzsche is nursed first by his sister and then by his mother, each of whom enjoys the pleasures of such powers, and has her plans. Finally, Nietzsche will be buried beneath the misreadings of his texts, and his message made to mean whatever sister or the sophists say it means, because Nietzsche has a biography which grows longer even in the grave. And he knew that at least the vehemence of his opinions would lie there beside him, just as the syphilis-induced madness of his mind was symbolically suited to dismay his final days.
At one time, in Western Europe, when Church and State were still important rivals, the cultural life of the people (its aspirations, moral norms, even the functions of its arts) were in the keeping of the Church, and remained in the realm of the sacred. The State progressively secularized or politicized the cultural arena, and Nietzsche foresaw the terrible dangers inherent in this development and opposed it. But he stood on the side of the Church without a church to stand beside. In the United States (that forerunner of every future) the separation of the two powers (desirable as the divorce is) has permitted commercial interests to take over
culture and determine values, successfully invading and subverting both politics and religion. That conquest is what capitalism has come to signify. Politics and religion (as well as art) are now simply business by other means.
Having rejected Christian dogma and seen the Church’s dominance pass to an even more resolutely vulgar and military-minded nation-state; feeling helpless, certainly, before the dismaying cultural forces then at work; Nietzsche lets his shadow fall upon the only world where he is strong. He ultimately adopts a Stoic posture, despite his denunciation of similar strategies of “self-discipline,” concealing his inwardly aimed adjustments to society beneath a helmet of hyperbole and metaphorically aggressive shield-slapping. The esthetic impulse emerges most genuinely from the medium of its expertise, so that when Nietzsche works out upon himself, the self he shapes is cast first, like a shade, upon a sheet. It is a beguiling form, but one his fingers fashion.
In an exceedingly interesting, and often touching, collection of memories about Nietzsche called
Conversations with Nietzsche
, edited by Sander Gilman, Ida Overbeck, the wife of one of his oldest friends, writes:
I always believed that Nietzsche, despite all opposition to Christianity, was not an enemy of religion, however aloof from it he stood, and that he was himself even capable of producing religious effects. The superman as a substitute for God and the doctrine of return as substitute for immortality, however, seemed not to be very tenable idealistic fantasies.
Just as activities that seem quite different from one another (such as adding a bar bill or rolling the dice to see who will pay it) can turn out, on inspection, to have the same form (as do climbing a ladder, of course, and advancing through the company, or polishing the silver and going to confession), so may convictions that appear quite opposite and antagonistic result in indistinguishable attitudes. Predestination (the faith of his father) and chance (the floozie he courted) have an affinity for each other, as does the view
(he also went with) that reality is made up of the meaningless movements of matter, caroms that occasionally throw off an inconsequential spray of sparks we call consciousness; because each renders agents impotent before affairs, so that we are, in effect, riding on the back of a tiger, a cork bobbing upon an indifferent swell, or a character captured in an already written book. The importance of these doctrines, as far as the individual is concerned, is that they protect, enhance, and justify an attitude; they express a philosophical disposition; they don’t merely, in some circumstances, seem reasonable or appropriate, or momentarily work in one’s favor, although they may certainly possess such advantages; rather, they reflect an indigenous state of character and mind: of melancholia, impulsiveness, helplessness, paranoia, megalomania, anality, and so on. For the masters in any society, profit and power are an ideal’s principal payoff, whereas its value for the individual often rests in the comfort, consolation, and security it provides. Honesty in a philosopher means that he will deceive himself first. Despite their professed allegiance to rigor and clarity, philosophers have joyfully danced to jargon’s tunes and religiously carried out the rituals of obfuscation. The truth holds nobody back.
The superman is not a replacement for God. The superman is one of the elect. Eternal recurrence is thought to justify the fall of the littlest sparrow; and every evil in the world, insofar as it is a part of a work of art, only adds to the interest of the drama, like the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands. In addition to the many sympathies between Nietzsche’s ideas and his father’s pastoral ones, there are formal affinities too—between the rhetoric of the prophet Zarathustra, for instance, and that of the prophets Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. In
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
, Kathleen Marie Higgins has placed Nietzsche’s work very firmly within a context of traditional dogma. In the Christian drama of redemption, for instance, the future is past before it reaches the present. This is no less true in Nietzsche.
The two Nietzsches—critic and castigator, affirmer and celebrant—usually have different admirers. During his sad last raving
days, according to a report in Gilman’s collection of reminiscences, he was given to brooding and was largely unreceptive to his surroundings—playing with dolls and other toys.
When states of excitement come over him, his mother best knows how to calm him down. She caresses him, speaks to him in a friendly tone, and when he wants to scream she fills his mouth with small slices of apple or easily digestible delicacies, which he then chews and swallows while growling dully to himself.
I think I prefer my Nietzsche without the bits of apple in his mouth.
T
he Wittgenstein home in Vienna, it was said with some exaggeration, held seven grand pianos, a condition that certainly stamped it as Viennese. It also housed five sons, the first three of whom were suicides: one by drowning, one from a gunshot, one through poison. The two sons who remained often considered taking their own lives, too, but, through some inadvertence, did not. The family’s three daughters fared better in this regard because, although just as much was expected of them, it did not include measuring up to quite so many marks or reaching quite such stressful heights.
In those days, if music appeared to be the rosy flush of Vienna’s fame, suicide seemed its fever. The newsworthy surface of society was regularly ruffled by someone’s dramatically premature demise. There was Otto Weininger, whose crackpot book
Sex and Character
Wittgenstein, in his early years, admired; Ludwig Boltzmann, important for his work in statistical dynamics, and one with whom, equally early, Wittgenstein wished to study in Vienna; the poet Georg Trakl; notables like the architect of the Imperial Opera House, Eduard van der Null; aristocrats of a rank as elevated as the Baron Franz von Uchatius, including actual imperialities such as the Crown Prince Rudolf himself—each a distinguished suicide.
For the old, dying is dismal and takes the shine from death. One has grown accustomed to the succession of small disappointments that makes up most of life, so the failures that have followed one
about like a smelly, undismissable mutt now resemble a faithful, if antic, companion. The young, however—still so near the time when they were not alive that not being alive again exerts a powerful fascination—cannot help but look at the threat of the years to come and expect them to be as marked by loneliness, remorse, and triviality as those that they have so far survived. Success turns down no soothing bed of rest either, since it can seem to supply but the starting place for yet another, more arduous, climb. Life, they have to wonder (since they once had such hopes for it), life comes to … is for … what? And if life is so precious, why is so much of it—everywhere around them—habitually, extravagantly, wasted? If life is a meaningless chore, it is well one’s chores are concluded promptly, and the mess swept. Thus the suicide skips dying and goes to death as through a door—a door he may slam, if he likes, as he leaves.
In households like the Wittgensteins’, what is remembered of the mother is often pale as an old print tacked to an out-of-the-way wall: its image gray, stiff, still, ornately ovaled. It is the father who is the moving Figure, the Presence, the Ghost of the Olden Days. It is his chains that will send their rattle through the rooms and bind the occupants to a presence that is past, yet a past that will not release its outlived days to die away in rings of weakening reverberation, but one whose hold grows greater by being gone.
Gone, or for the moment far away, the Presence is enlarged by the erasure of what seems irrelevant about its actual Being until it can be simply felt as moral authority, heard as stern commandment, seen as shining example. That the Presence picks his teeth, is forgetful, frequently falls asleep and is afraid of dreaming: these foibles are mislaid; every sign of weakness is turned to point the other way. Whatever is ordinary fades until only a giant is remembered, one that is cross and condemnatory, implacable, its sentences certain, its judgments final. One thinks of the anger, the terror, the cringing obedience, the need to please, that Kafka’s father inspired, and how the father’s frown became a crease across his son’s face, and how loathsome the son’s sense of servitude was
to both of them. For such a son, too, a role was reserved, defined for him from the beginning, waiting for him like his plot in the cemetery: to husband a wife, father her children, to head a household, to emulate a feared figure, to overcome, to succeed … in short, to be what he hated and could not compel himself to be.
Karl, who would occupy the Presence in this case, had a vigorous intelligence with an energy to match, and set a brisk, if not impossible, pace. He was quick of both head and hands, decisive, charming, bold, brutal (he became a successful industrialist), good-looking, confident, arrogant, witty (more German than Jew, he was loyal to his culture, not to God), a despiser of failure in any form, and of every form of humbug. Like the dyspeptic Flaubert, who compiled a dictionary of thoughtless thoughts in common use, or more likely Karl Kraus, who publicly exposed them, he snipped outstanding imbecilities from periodicals and papers and, in later life, sent them to his son Ludwig, who took custody of the collection.
To Karl’s beleaguered sons an early death must have seemed the inherited fate of the family. In any event, Ludwig faced a life, as we read of it, that was remarkably free, almost from its inception, of those pleasures that fasten, like lions, young teeth to their meat; that tempt them to pranks, into forbidden explorations, or lead them to enliven dull routine with frivolity and flamboyance. There was, along his road, but rare success and frequent failure: success that was usually deceitful and temporary, and failure he took so to heart it could scarcely beat beneath the burden.
Dutifully enough, Wittgenstein begins the study of mechanical engineering in Berlin, but shortly finds an excuse to enrich his education in Manchester and on the moors near Glossop, where he designs and flies his own kites during aeronautical and meteorological experiments. This is 1908, when he’s nineteen, and the flying machine is more than a dream. Although he had the inventor’s handyman mind, in addition to the abstract intelligence he would later display, his attention quickly turned from the kite to the motor that would drive it, and then, by stages that were by no
means direct, to physics and the formulas that expressed its principles (from the craft to its engine, from the propeller to the propeller’s torque and the algebras of air, from the movement of molecules finally to the behavior of numbers). Wittgenstein flew to the fundamental as naturally as his kites and balloons rose in the wind, so that even when he whistled Mozart, the dexterity of his tongue and lips was still in the service of the logical articulation of an idea. One of his more dazzling—and puzzling—notebook entries runs: “Musical themes are in a certain sense propositions. And so the recognition of the essence of logic will lead to the recognition of the essence of music.” Schopenhauer, whom Wittgenstein had been reading, would have put it the other way around: “Propositions are in a certain sense like musical themes. And so the recognition of the essence of music will lead to the recognition of the essence of logic.”
Taught by tutors, and with consequently little training in how to plod through a discipline from one bleak peak to another, it was easy for Wittgenstein to appear to drift toward whatever was prior and basic and presumably free of the clutter and tarnish of applications. Very soon his father’s funds were financing a sojourn in Cambridge, where he took in Bertrand Russell’s lectures the way some people might take in the Taj. In no time he was suffering from that fever for first principles we call philosophy; that heavy hunt for ultimates that only skepticism, or the petty grind and pretentious rites of graduate schools, can cool.