A Defense of Ardor Page 6

  But in the case of literature, I’m not sure that Nietzsche’s influence was especially fortunate. I’m not entirely displeased by the notion that the young Malraux might have praised not passionate, blind action, but something else (naturally I can’t say what might have captivated Malraux had he not found access to Nietzsche), that Lafcadio wouldn’t have felt compelled to commit murders in a rushing train, that D. H. Lawrence might have directed his quests elsewhere had he not believed exclusively in the saving power of sex, that d’Annunzio might have curbed his cascades of rhetoric. Neither am I put off by the hypothesis that certain extravagances of modern French thought might never have seen the light of day (or the light of library lamps). And I wonder then what the intellectual twentieth century might have been if Friedrich Nietzsche had died of scarlet fever at the age of eight. I’m not sure—in spite of the charm and intensity of my experiences reading Nietzsche as a young man and in spite of my reluctance to put pastors’ sons to death even if only in my imagination—that I wouldn’t prefer this hypothetical century without Nietzsche. Other thinkers’ voices might have been more audible—that of Simone Weil, for example, one of the few thinkers to remain untouched by Nietzsche’s influence. We’re told often enough that we shouldn’t place the blame for the pupils’ follies on the shoulders of their teachers. And yet I can’t help thinking that if Nietzsche had used terms like “proud,” “cultivation,” “superman,” “will to power,” or “beyond good and evil” less frequently—someone once rightly observed that beyond good and evil lies only evil—the spiritual atmosphere of our century might have been purer and perhaps even prouder. And would it have been such a disaster if Nietzsche’s famous skepticism toward the notion of truth hadn’t given birth to so many eager imitators, even in the last few decades?

  However, perhaps Nietzsche—or someone with a more philosophical disposition than I possess might object—owes his belated, phenomenal success in part to readers who weren’t entirely convinced by him and didn’t doubt the value of truth. Otherwise they would treat his work the same way they deal with, for example, Maupassant’s novellas; however much they esteem and admire them, no one tries to shape his life around them or adapt his convictions to them. Incidentally, those who’ve lived in totalitarian countries have learned to their cost that it doesn’t pay to speculate excessively on a subject as dangerous as the truth, and that the genuine absence of truth makes itself felt immediately, and painfully.

  Of course, if there were no Nietzsche, Gottfried Benn wouldn’t have written certain essays and even perhaps certain poems; Ulrich, Musil’s hero in The Man Without Qualities, would have had slightly different preoccupations and interests; certain passages in the Duino Elegies might have sounded a tiny bit different; Tonio Kröger would have chatted differently with Lisaweta. (Perhaps someday they’ll develop a computer so powerful that it could produce a simulation titled “The Intellectual Twentieth Century sans Nietzsche”; many pages of the greater and lesser works of our age would undergo an abrupt, powerful earthquake that would send letters scattering in all directions, the printer’s ink would vanish from hundreds of industriously blackened pages—including the one I am now writing.)

  There are homes, clubs, parties, at which the name Nietzsche may not even be pronounced. On the other hand, I know readers of Nietzsche who admire him boundlessly as a writer, a master of style, and who love him personally, a feeble, sickly, homeless artist passing from one sanatorium to another, a man so sensitive and helpless that he couldn’t even manage to get married. They don’t give a thought, though, to the philosophical, not to mention political, content of his work. Still others ignore the life of the poor philologist from Basel, and pay almost no heed to his writing, his stylistic vitality; they merely plunder his books in search of philosophical ammunition for their own intellectual cannons and pistols. I have to say that I prefer the first group, which doesn’t mean that I favor ignoring the essence of Nietzsche’s message. I sometimes see him as a mediator in the difficult negotiations between reason and irrationality—a mediator who betrays his mission and finally sides completely with irrationality. His work holds, as we know, certain elements of Enlightenment thought, the search for human autonomy, for example. But they aren’t decisive; irrationality finally wins the day, and the mediator allies himself with one of the participants in the great debate.

  The field on which this unsuccessful, betrayed mediation takes place is perhaps the central territory of Western thought, which has spent centuries trying, with great effort and no success, to effect an agreement, or perhaps just a truce, between reason and irrationality, science and religion, political moderation and spiritual radicalism, rationalist humanism and Christianity, Settembrini and Naphta, between the typical “civilized writer” of our times—liberal, cautious, voting in favor of impotence over power without fully understanding, perhaps, certain irrational strains in reality—and a thinker like Simone Weil. The Enlightenment favored the rational side, while the Romantics, as we know, were disposed toward the irrational. This imbalance continues to the present day, assuming new guises. Today we have a vast, positivist, scientific culture that has almost entirely been purged of curiosity about the dark and irrational, while on the other hand there is the New Age with its superstitious take on the cosmos, alongside mass culture, which either favors sentimentalism or else openly admits its fascination with force, blood, and the devil.

  The people who can’t bear to hear Nietzsche’s name usually associate it with all that is worst in the history of the last century, with the SS’s black uniforms and Hitler’s ideology. It’s not easy to strain truth from slander: Nietzsche’s last writings, with their massive ideological stylistics (we’re taken aback, could this be the same Nietzsche, we ask, who wrote Untimely Meditations, the reader of Montaigne?), could and must have appealed to the Nazis, and some part of the blame must fall upon their author. This can’t be forgotten; the shadow of Auschwitz likewise falls upon Europe’s libraries. But we must approach this with great caution and a sober mind so as not to follow in the footsteps of those hotheaded critics eager to track down the accused’s address and brand him as an imperialist, a reactionary, a fascist. Thomas Mann always defended Nietzsche against the radicals’ accusations, at times perhaps for reasons more sentimental than rational. Now, so many years after the great war, it’s fairly clear that Nietzsche can neither be acquitted nor convicted in the political courtroom to which he is dragged time after time by both his admirers and his enemies.

  One of the unexpected elements of our Nietzschean legacy has been the deepening of the chasm that divides our private lives from the outside world. Nietzsche’s observations on certain elements of our internalized culture retain an astonishing freshness today: his emphasis on inspiration, spiritual strength, ingenuity, imaginative originality, wit, the need for form, distance, elegance, even ecstasy. His critique of historical positivism in the study of ancient Greece hasn’t faded, and his assessments of many writers and composers still stand today. If, though, we view his work as a program for civilization, the consequences of turning this utopia into reality would be catastrophic. And in fact this has proven to be the case to some degree. Hence the not-unjustified suspicion that Nietzsche should be read doubly, selectively; with the aid of a well-sharpened pencil, we must winnow out whatever bears on introspection, poetry, music from everything dealing with political systems, morality, and law. This isn’t a facile, painless assertion—it’s only one step from here, after all, to the claim that the world itself is doubled and torn, as we are, and that we require separate thinkers to catalogue the world of politics, on the one hand, and to pass judgment on art or literature, on the other. In fact, though, this division is already in effect. We reach for the essays and articles of Raymond Aron not in order to seek out his comments on the experience—persistence—of culture, but to learn about our age’s political and ideological mechanics. Whereas with Heidegger or Gottfried Benn, or—if you prefer a different example—Foucault, we d
on’t expect commentary that might be of use to the parliamentarians of the European Union. The issue here isn’t the small-scale problem of scholarly or philosophical specialization. It is the deep rift in our intellectual sensibility, our very being, that Nietzsche wished to heal, but he succeeded only in deepening it dramatically, and for the duration. Of course he wanted to heal it, since after all his plan for the superman and for conquering nihilism were aimed at creating a cultural totality, new and unified, universal. His vision presents colossal dangers, though. His immoral-ism, for example, may be seductive—to some readers, though not to me—on paper, or in the imagination of a frail and sickly philosopher, tormented by migraines, but it is horrific in practical application. Moreover he completely failed to recognize the developmental tendencies of European political and social reality that caused this rift to grow ever deeper, monumental, bottomless.

  The enthusiasm with which European writers and artists greeted his work is understandable. It was prompted, after all, not by an apish need for Nietzsche-worship, but by the sense that his critique of modernity coincided with their own intuitions, fears, and hopes. If I’m correct, his reformulation—and thus preservation—of a hereditary spirituality, an irrational, creative, spiritual element, must have proven especially compelling. God may have died, but religiousness would remain (or at least a certain chthonic form of religiousness). Christianity and the “judaic mentality”—yet another dubious point in Nietzschean rhetoric—were supposedly doomed to annihilation, but a form of artistry tinged with metaphysics would live on. Transcendence must be jettisoned, but that part of humanity that yearns for transcendence, the energy previously “given up” to God, would prove to be the treasure and foundation for a new phase of civilization, so long as it is turned to earth and not to heaven (all of this is of course obvious to anyone who’s read Nietzsche). But who today—besides French intellectuals of the older and middle generations—would prefer Nietzscheanism to Christianity? A sect to a religion? An adventure with uncertain aims to a “proud” tradition?

  He wanted to give a name to the unknown. Nietzsche is one of those philosopher-poets who operate precisely in the same sphere as the great poets. Poets, though—and this unites them—don’t strive at all to uncover some proto-substance, some proto-element, they don’t seek to set out a unified being in a discursive, systematic, articulated manner. They’re satisfied with suggestions, allusions, a net full of metaphors; the notion that they should be on the lookout for a single, central metaphor is foreign to them. Poets are vain, excessively so, perhaps, but they can’t, as a rule, be charged with the ambition—hubris, rather—of saving civilization through the apt choice of the one and only metaphor. Poetry is condemned to live with mystery, alongside mystery, in endless, energizing uncertainty. Whereas Nietzsche passionately sought to exterminate systematically the world’s mystery, to track down the answer to the great riddle. Here he was clearly following his great precursors, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer in particular, who was, as we know, both his greatest teacher and his greatest foe. Paradoxically, though, he was also following in the footsteps of the very positivist pedants he loathed, the counters of vertebrae and Homer’s syllables.

  Nietzsche is not today one of the forgotten nineteenth-century philosophers read only by specialists, such as Feuerbach or that bête noire of Untimely Meditations, David Strauss. Just the opposite—he enjoys revival after revival and it’s hard to imagine a good bookstore in the Western world that doesn’t carry his work. He’s read by young people in the States and France, he’s being retranslated in Poland and the new versions will no doubt soon supplant the old fin de siècle translations. The right wing quotes him—which should come as no surprise—but then again, so does the left, which is somewhat less self-evident. Philologists and political scientists cite him. A few years back several of the most distinguished philosophers of the new generation in France published a collective volume under the title Pourquoi nous ne sommes pas Nietzschéens—a touching, if negative, tribute to the great, controversial thinker. Clearly the layers of contemporaneity still hidden in his thought—in the argument between rationality and irrationality, in the challenge of “life” to norms—are incalculable.

  Hugo von Hofmannsthal said about Napoleon somewhere that he knew he couldn’t walk like a king. The same could be said about Nietzsche—except that Nietzsche didn’t realize that he’d never be able to carry himself like a real aristocrat (in case anyone is unduly distressed by his or her proletarian sensitivities and takes my comparison amiss, I’ll note that I’m speaking purely metaphorically). His endless praise of aristocratic behavior, power, and elegance betray him as someone who is more a Napoleon than a hereditary monarch. Although of course he was quick to recognize this defect in others; in Twilight of the Idols (Untimely Meditations, part 12) he writes apropos of Carlyle that “the longing for strong faith is not proof of strong faith, but just the opposite. Whoever possesses faith may permit himself the splendid luxury of skepticism: since he is sure enough, firm enough, sufficiently fettered to his faith.”

  It was Thomas Mann who commented in his essay on Nietzsche that he was a brilliant psychologist who overlooked only one object—himself. (Nietzsche’s psychology would be, needless to say, a separate, lengthy chapter unto itself. It’s regrettable, though, that he was so thoroughly a psychologist of demasking, and so little a psychologist capable of understanding the enormous complexity of virtually every mental state or condition.) The splendid luxury of skepticism was something that Nietzsche himself dramatically, radically lacked in his final phase—and who knows, perhaps one of the causes of Nietzsche’s majestic, splendid defeat lies hidden here. A defeat for which the philosopher himself is to blame, and perhaps also, to some degree, the modern world. Since the modern world didn’t wish to accept Nietzsche’s critique as he himself had formulated it. But the world would have resisted a similar critique even if it had been far more delicately phrased, if even Nietzsche himself had said, simply, naively—which would have been entirely out of character!—that the modern world doesn’t cherish life, it lacks generosity, spontaneity, nobility, and poetry.

  4 Toil and Flame

  When I first met him—in 1983, the year I began living in Paris—Czapski was eighty-seven years old. I think he’d stopped getting around on his famous scooter by then, and rarely went into Paris. For all this, though, in spite of these two concessions to age, he was still essentially a young man, still absorbed in his painting, reading, and conversations with friends.

  I knew many older people. As with so many other things in life, old age—if I’m not mistaken, since I’ll only have the last word on this down the line—is largely the playing out of a comedy. Weakness, shortness of breath, shuffling feet—all these are purely physical symptoms, of course. But it’s enough to have had firsthand experience of even the flu or a fever to know that if we’ve got the physical symptoms—as long as they’re not accompanied by hellish pain or loss of consciousness—we’ll play them for all that they’re worth. It’s the same thing—or so I suppose!—with old age. Most old people agree to play out this comedy, just as most students casually assume the role of students, middle-aged people behave like middle-aged people, women play women, men play men, and politicians uncannily impersonate politicians.

  Czapski, on the other hand, refused old age, just as he had once rejected his aristocratic origins. He behaved as sovereignly and freely toward old age as he did, for example, to his Polishness. A few analogies might come in handy here. Czapski was indeed an old Polish aristocrat, but from the aristocracy he took only his graciousness, his breeding; he was inflexibly opposed to the cult of Polishness; he treated his old age with humor (although we know from what’s been published of his diary that he experienced—like everyone—all the fears associated with aging). I remember how he once jokingly described the conversation of a few very elderly gentlemen: “You know, throughout the whole thing the clearest sound was the gentle tapping of dentures.”

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p; At a certain point, though, analogies deceive us. Neither Polishness nor aristocracy took belated revenge on Czapski; age, a stronger force, older and wiser, caught up with him at last four years before his death. He began his slow decline—faltering strength, great weakness, an ebbing spirit, a muted memory. There was no longer any question of playing out the comedy or rejecting it. Suddenly a different power had appeared, indifferent to comedy and tragedy alike.

  But even the last years were not entirely desolate. His friends came and read his own essays to him (his eyesight was almost entirely gone by then). Earlier Jozef had asked for other writers, but near the end he wanted to hear only his own texts. This wasn’t an old man’s narcissism; rather, it was a desperate effort to halt his fleeing memory. Sometimes when I would stop by, Jozef would be half lying on the sofa, absent, exhausted, apathetic, sometimes even with a blanket pulled over his head, as if hiding from the world, very old. But whenever I started reading him one of his essays, say on Rozanov, he’d revive, rise from the dead, suddenly remember everything (no, not everything, but everything about Rozanov), start finishing his own sentences. It was clear that he remembered whatever quotes he’d used in the essay especially well. These quotes obviously meant far more to him than mere literary embellishments; these were sentences he must have lived with, considered for weeks, months, turning them over in his mind like pebbles, weighing them, debating them. They had become so firmly fixed in his mind that to hear one of them pronounced out loud still had a magical effect and drew his mind back from oblivion, sparked the light of intelligence in his eyes once again.