My Friend Friedrich

Nietzsche says a lot of things, most of them vain, which is only fitting. He has more balls than Ayn Rand and when he wrote Human, All Too Human in 1878 he had not yet succumb to his disciple’s kind of crazy. He never would, dying of an all too different crazy ten years later.

Unlike Beyond Good and Evil (the one with, “the abyss gazes also”) Human spends a lot of time one “artists,” mostly writers and musicians, reaching the eventual conclusion that “We could give art up, but in doing so we would not forfeit what it has taught us to do.” In this it is much more hit and miss, and given to descend, sharply and critically, into the midst of nineteenth century bourgeoisie thinking. The next sentence reads: “Similarly, we have given up religion, but not the emotional intensification and exaltation it led to.”

Right. That’s why we “Christianized” all those savage Indians.

To be fair, Nietzsche never saw America. Would he have thought us a glorious experiment in observational evolution? Did we not carve society out of the “untrammeled wood,” imposing our will upon an entire landmass and mercilessly exterminating its natives, our rivals? Would we not exemplify all the best and worst that is his philosophy? None of Horace in Nietzsche’s talk of “artists.” None of this, “he tamed the beast within,” crap for our boy Friedrich…he would no doubt consider Art’s civilizing power a vestige of “slave morality.” No poets will form Nietzsche’s civilization. Art itself will wither and die the same death reserved for religion. After all, who ever survived with poem? Except Nietzsche.

“Soon the artist will be regarded as a wondrous relic, on whose strength and beauty the happiness of earlier times depended; honors will be shown him, such as we cannot grant to our own equals.”

The post-modernist in me fights the urge to grin as a writer criticizes other writers. In prose, no less. I snicker down at my friend Friedrich from my vaunted place atop his one hundred and seven year-old grave. I don’t to plan to go anywhere, old man, and neither do my brothers and sisters, in success or out. The world has always needed artists…as much, if not more, than it needs self-obsessed, German philosophers. Who are you, the man who would write Zarathustra, to say, “Art proceeds from man’s natural ignorance about his interior (in body and character): it is not for physicists or philosophers”?

I will admit, however, that my friend Friedrich gets some things right. He also spake, “Ostensibly [the artist] is fighting for the higher dignity and meaning of man; in truth, he does not want to give up the most effective presuppositions for his art, that is the fantastic, the mythic, uncertain, extreme, feeling for the symbolic, over estimation of the individual, belief in something miraculous about genius: thus he thinks the continuation of his manner of creating is more important than a scientific dedication to truth in every form, however plain it ay appear.”

How nice it must to live in an age that still believed in “truth,” or that it might, at the very least, actually set you free.