Nietzsche

I
Tragedy without a Cast
To profit most from existence, man must live dangerously.
The tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche is a monodrama: no other
figure is present on the brief lived stage of his existence. Across
the acts of this tragedy, which crash down and surge on like
an avalanche, the isolated combatant stands alone beneath
the stormy sky of his own destiny; nobody is alongside him,
nobody is opposing him and no woman is there to momentarily
relax the overstrung atmosphere with her presence. Every
movement issues from him alone and he is its sole witness:
the few figures who at the outset linger in his shadow can only
accompany his heroic enterprise with gestures of dumb astonishment
and alarm and little by little distance themselves from
him as if from some danger. Not a single being dare properly
enter the inner sanctum of that destiny; always Nietzsche
speaks, struggles, suffers for himself alone. He addresses no
one and no one responds. Worst of all: no one is even listening.
There are no other people, no fellows, no listeners in this
unique tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche, but neither is there a
stage, scenery or costume, for it plays out, so to speak, only in
the airless space of the idea. Basel, Naumburg, Nice, Sorrento,
Sils-Maria, Genoa, these names were not those of Nietzsche’s
homes, but merely a series of milestones along a road travelled
in a burning flight, the cold colourless wings of the theatre.
In truth the scene of this tragedy always remains the same:
isolation, solitude, that cruelly wordless responseless solitude
that his thought carries within and around itself like an opaque
bell-jar, a solitude without flowers or colours, without sounds,
animals or people, a solitude deprived even of God, the extinct
and stony solitude of some primeval world existing before
or beyond time. What makes this desolation so harrowing
and ghastly, so truly grotesque, is that this glacier, this desert
of solitude occurred at the heart of an Americanized Germany
of some seventy million inhabitants, in the rattling and whirring
of telegraphs and trains, of cries and tumult, at the centre
of a morbidly prurient culture which every year launches
forty thousand volumes into the world, that every day searches
around a thousand different problems in a hundred universities,
that every day stages tragedies in hundreds of theatres, and
yet knows nothing, divines nothing and senses nothing of the
great drama of the spirit unfolding right in their midst.
For it was precisely at its most sublime moments that the
tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche failed to find spectator, listener,
or sole witness in the German world. At the beginning when he
is in a position to proclaim from the lofty heights of his professorial
lectern and the spotlight of Wagner finds him, his discourse
secures a measure of regard. But the deeper he descends
inside himself, the more he plunges into the far reaches of time,
the less any response is detected. One after another, friends,
strangers, stand up shocked, in the course of his heroic monologues,
alarmed by the ever more wild transformations, the
ever more heated frenzies of horrifying solitude, and abandon
him on the stage of his destiny. Little by little the tragic actor
becomes agitated at declaiming into a void, so he begins to
raise his voice, to shout and gesticulate more wildly to create an
echo or at least a contradiction. To harmonise with his words,
he invents a surging, intoxicating, Dionysian music – but now
no one is listening. He tries a harlequinesque turn, ascribes to
a forced gaiety, strident and piercing; he builds into his phrases
all manner of twists and turns (mimicking comic improvisations),
just to attract through artificial amusements, listeners to
his deadly earnest evangel, but no hand is moved to applaud.
Finally he invents a dance, a dance of swords and, butchered,
torn, bloodied, he performs his new deadly art to the public,
but no one guesses the significance of these shrill jokes, nor
the passion wounded to death that exists in this affected lightheartedness.
Without listeners or echo, the most extraordinary
drama of the spirit ever granted to our troubled century is
played out to its bitter end before an empty house. No one
turns their glance even cursorily towards him, when the whirligig
of his thoughts spinning on a steel point leaps exuberantly
for the last time and finally falls, exhausted on the ground –
‘Dead by immortality’.
This aloneness with the self, this solitary state of being face to
face with the self, is in the deepest sense the exceptional sacred
affliction of that tragedy which was Friedrich Nietzsche’s existence.
Never was such an imposing consummation of the spirit,
such an extreme bacchanal of feeling placed before such a
colossal void of the world, in the face of such a metallically inviolable
silence. Nietzsche never even had the fortune to find
worthy adversaries; so the most powerful will of thought,
‘closed in on itself and burrowing deep into itself’, was obliged
to seek out a response and a resistance in his own breast, in his
own tragic soul. It wasn’t the world, but the bleeding strips of
his own skin that this spirit raging with destiny tore away, like
Heracles, his Nessus shirt, with that burning desire to be bared
before ultimate truth, to confront himself. But what glacial chill
accompanies this nakedness, what silence around this cry of the
spirit without precedent, what terrible sky crossed by storm
clouds and lightning, above this ‘God murderer’, who now having
encountered no adversary turns on his own being, ‘Knower
of himself, torturer of himself, merciless one’. Hounded by his
demon beyond time and the world, beyond even the furthest
limits of his being.
Shaken alas! by unknown fevers,
Trembling before airborne icy shafts,
Hunted down by you, oh thought!
Inexpressible! Sinister! Horrifying!
Sometimes he recoils quivering, with a nameless look of terror,
when he recognises to what extent his life has rushed beyond
all that was living and all that had been. But an impulse so
powerful can no longer be restrained: with surging confidence
and hugely intoxicated with his own self, he accomplishes the
destiny that his beloved Hölderlin had prefigured for him – that
of Empedocles.
Heroic landscape devoid of sky, sublime performance without
an audience and silence, a silence growing ever more intense
around the unbearable cry of this lonely spirit, that is the tragedy
of Friedrich Nietzsche. We should abhor them, as the
numberless insensate cruelties of nature were it not for the fact
that he himself selected and embraced them ecstatically, adoring
them for their unique harshness and solely because of that
uniqueness. For voluntarily, in all lucidity, renouncing a secure
existence, he constructs this ‘unconventional life’ with the most
profound tragic instinct, defying the gods with unrivalled courage,
to ‘experience himself the highest degree of danger in which
a man can live’. ‘Χαιρετε δαιυονε_! Hail, demons!’ It was with
this jocular cry of hubris, that once, one evening, in the light
hearted manner of students, Nietzsche and his philosopher
friends summon up supernatural powers: at the hour when the
spirits are abroad, they pour through the open window the red
wine from their brimful glasses into the sleepy Basel street as
a libation to the unseen, an imaginative jape, but one which harbours
a more serious presentiment nonetheless: for the demons
hearken to this call and pursue the one who defied them, turning
an evening lark into the monumental tragedy of a destiny.
And yet, Nietzsche never shrinks from the colossal demands
by which he feels irresistibly seized and drawn: the harder the
hammer strikes, the clearer the tone from the bronze anvil of his
will. And on this anvil, made red hot from the mighty flame,
is forged, ever more powerfully and reinforced with each blow,
the watchword which would armour his mind in bronze; ‘the
greatness of man’ amor fati: never seeking to change the past,
the future, eternity; not to just bear necessity, much less to conceal
it, but to love it. This ardent song of love addressed to the
spirits, covers like a dithyramb the cry of his own pain: bent to
the ground, crushed by the world’s silence, eaten up by himself,
seared by the bitterness of suffering, never once does he raise
his hands to ask of fate to finally forsake him. On the contrary,
he demands still greater adversity, deeper solitude, a larger
capacity for suffering. Not in defence does he raise his hands,
but to launch the glorious prayer of heroes: ‘Oh will of my soul,
that I call fate, you within me! You above me! Enshrine me and
preserve me for a great destiny.’
Whosoever offers up such grandiose prayers must surely be
heard.