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There can be little doubt, I think, that the
two 19th century philosophers who have had
the widest influence outside philosophy are
Marx and Nietzsche.
In continental Europe, especially, the influence
of Nietzsche on philosophers since his day
has been prodigious.
But he's also influenced creative writers,
including some of the most eminent in the
English language, for instance, Bernard Shaw,
W.B.
Yeats, and D.H. Lawrence.
The quality of his own prose is simply dazzling
and is second to nobody's.
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Saxony in
1844.
He had an academic career of extraordinary
brilliance as a Classics scholar and became
a full professor in his mid-20s, an almost
unheard of thing.
But then he threw over his university career,
went into isolation, and became a philosopher.
For 16 years he poured out his writings, mostly
either short books or books of essays and
aphorisms.
Some of the best known titles are, The Birth
Of Tragedy, Human, All Too Human, The Gay
Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and most famous
of all, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
At first, he was deeply influenced by the
ideas of Schopenhauer and Wagner.
But he rebelled against both and went on to
produce some notorious anti-Wagner polemics.
Until the last four years of his creative
life, he made no attempt to build a system
of any kind.
But then he began to think of drawing all
his main themes together into one single comprehensive
work, first to be called The Will To Power,
then The Revaluation Of All Values.
But it was not to be.
Always plagued by ill health, in January 1889,
he collapsed into mental illness, a condition
almost certainly caused by tertiary syphilis.
And he was helplessly insane until his death
in 1900.
With me to discuss his work is J.P. Stern,
professor of German in the University of London,
and author of one of the best known of the
many books on Nietzsche.
Professor Stern, I think one can say that
Nietzsche was the first philosopher really
to face up to Western man's loss of faith
in religion, loss of belief in God or in the
existence of any world outside this one.
And if there's no God, and no transcendental
world, then all values, or truth, rationalities,
standards of any kind, are not given to man
from some agency outside himself, but are
created by man, presumably, for his own needs.
We choose our values, or at least we create
our values.
Now this is an extraordinary disruptive and
disturbing thing to confront, and Nietzsche
knew that.
Can we start the story from there?
Yes, I think that this is a perfectly fair
way of starting.
In addition to what you said about his life,
I think we might mention that he was a son
of the man's, that he himself had-- his father
was a minister of the Lutheran church.
And therefore his attack on Christianity is
not a neutral, not as disinterested, not a
pacific thing at all, but is violent, dramatic,
melodramatic in many ways.
It's an attack on Christianity rather than
on Christ.
And I think the point that you made, that
he envisages 19th century man to have to stand
on his own feet without the support of faith
or dogma of any kind, is a central kind of
starting point to his philosophy.
I think we want to see him as somebody who
does not simply profess a flat kind of atheism,
but who is personally, intimately involved
in the denial of divine justice, divine mercy,
and all that.
But this Nietzschian starting point did launch
him-- didn't it?-- into a revaluation of all
values, to use the title of his book.
One thing he was saying was, in a way, we're
basing our lives on false premises.
Because we adopt attitudes, and values, and
standards, which, when we actually examine
the premises of them, we reject those premises,
the old traditional premises.
What he believed in, what he tried to show
was that the who edifice, both of Christian
values and of idealism-- which he saw derivative
from those values-- was false, had to be thrown
over, and something else to be put in it's
stead.
The question as to what was to be put in it's
stead is not quite so simple.
But that was the basic premise from which
he began.
And that, I think, makes for the melodrama--
the extraordinary melodrama-- of the person,
of the style, of the whole phenomenon of Nietzsche.
Now this revaluation of all values is, of
course, a colossal task.
And I think it'll make our discussion of it
clearer if we divide our consideration of
it up a little bit.
There are four main traditions within Western
civilization to which Nietzsche addressed
himself and which he attacked; the tradition
of Christian morality, the tradition of secular
morality, the herd values, as he called them--
the ordinary morality of the mass of mankind--
and some, at least, of the traditions deriving
from Ancient Greece from Socrates.
Now let's have a look at each of those four
in turn.
Can you say a little bit more about his fundamental
criticism of Christian values?
Well, I think to start with, on the Christian,
I think the attack is a very simple one, a
very straightforward one.
All the positive values of Christianity--
turning the other cheek, loving your neighbor
as you love yourself, having compassion for
those suffering-- all these are ruled out
of court.
Now, not absolutely, because, as we shall
see later I think-- I want to make that point
very clearly-- Nietzsche is constantly making
special rules for special people.
And he is very much against the notion of
generalizing simple rules in the way in which
Kant had done in the categorical imperative.
So, yes, the first thing then is the attack,
not on Christ, but on Christianity as really
furthering the underdog, furthering the person
who cannot stand on his own feet and requires
compassion, requires pity, illicitly requires
sympathy from the outside.
But why was he against compassion, and against
pity?
Why did he despise those so much?
He's not against them.
He does not despise them.
And they come from the strong person.
What he despises is the support of the weak
person from outside himself-- whatever that
outside source may be-- whether it's another
person, his compassion, or rules, or regulations,
laws, or whatever.
And the reason for being against this was
what?
The reason for being against it was his fundamental
appeal as to authenticity, to selfhood, to
the [INAUDIBLE] vital, to the life within
the person, live to the full.
Now what about his criticism of secular morality?
The great moral philosophers like Kant or
[INAUDIBLE], the utilitarians and so on, that
wasn't Christian morality quite.
But he was against that, too.
Now why?
I think the main reason there is this, that
all systems of secular moralities are based
on an abstraction from the individual case.
They're based on an appeal to a generality.
For Nietzsche, the word "general" is the same
as "common."
And by "common," he means common in the nasty
sense of the word.
And therefore, in a sense, all rules and regulations--
one might go so far as saying all laws-- are,
for him, matters for the common herd and no
more.
And now we're, of course, already on the third
point that you made, the point about the common
herd.
He's most emphatically not a democratic philosopher.
He's a philosopher of the great and the noble
people, the heroic kind of philosophy.
And therefore, for him, the appeal of democratic
ideology is very, very, low indeed.
He thought that the noble man, the great man,
the hero should be a law unto himself and
shouldn't be hamstrung by petty rules and
regulations and so on.
That's the best phrase you can use, a law
unto himself.
That's not the sentence he used, but it's
very, very precise what he meant.
Now what about the last of the four traditions
that I mentioned, that of ancient Greece?
It's worth remembering, in this context, that
he did start adult life as a Classics scholar.
Yes, a professor of Classics.
He knew about Ancient Greece and became deeply
critical-- didn't he?-- of the whole tradition
deriving from Socrates.
Yes, but his classical work-- and I think
it's one of the most remarkable works ever
written on the whole problem of tragedy--
is concerned with pre-Socratic Greece, with
pre-Socratic tragedy, which, for him, is kind
of a golden age.
And the whole thing goes flat at the point
when Euripides, Aristophanes, and Socrates
come on the scene.
What happens there is that strength, and goodwill,
and warmth, and beauty, are replaced by reason,
are replaced by rationalizing things by the
Socratic argy-bargy.
He never forgave Plato, so to speak, for bringing
a hero whose main qualities are those of talking
everybody else in to the ground.
Now this concern with the origins of culture,
which he displayed in such a rich way one
has to say, was all bound up with this notion
that we make our values.
Because if human values and human culture
are made by us, and not given to us by a God
or authority outside ourselves, then the whole
question of how we get them, where they come
from, becomes a fundamental one here for him.
And it's also a fundamental 19th century concern,
the whole concern with origins, one thinks
of the Origin of Species, Darwinism and so
on.
Was Nietzsche influenced by Darwin?
Yes, well he certainly was anti-Darwinian.
And I think the idea is that he didn't really
understand very clearly what the whole theory
of the origin of the species came to.
Like so many 19th century figures, he was
always going to study physiology, going to
study chemistry, going to study physics, but
never got around to it.
So I don't think that there's an awful lot
of interesting things to be said about his
attitude to that.
But I think the main point about Origins is
that-- again, like some philosophers like
Marx, for instance-- he believes that you
can determine the quality of the product by
the nature and quality of the origin.
This, after all, is very much what Freud did.
And I suspect that Freud got it very largely
from Nietzsche.
But he isn't very ready to acknowledge it.
Now what that means is, really, that the background,
the genealogy of morals, for instance-- you
quoted one of the titles-- is, in fact, indicative
of the quality of morals.
Now, let me say, I don't believe this is true.
But that is very much the 19th century view
over and over again, that you can determine
the quality of a mental product by the nature,
by the origin, that is at the back of it.
And we are now inclined, sometimes, to call
that the genetic fallacy.
But we don't want to go into that.
Yes, I think it's very close.
Your mentioning of Freud prompts another question
that I wanted to put to you.
This program of re-evaluating values and seeing
values as something that we create to meet
our needs led Nietzsche to a psychological
analysis of values, in terms of both individual
and social needs, didn't he?
That is perfectly true.
And it becomes an, essentially, psychological
inquiry.
It is a way of psychologizing a lot of phenomena.
This is perfectly correct.
And, indeed, I think he was a very remarkable
psychologist, in many ways.
He does not produce a system, either in psychology
or in anything else, and in that sense he's
different from Freud.
But he's very, very similar, in fact, very
much of an antecedent to Freud, because he
places a very great deal of emphasis upon
the unconscious.
There is a myth to the effect that Freud invented
the unconscious.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The unconscious has been about since the end
of the 18th century.
And Nietzsche is one of those who used that
term and put tremendous emphasis on it.
But he does not have a layer theory of the
self the way that Freud did.
As I say, he is very, very much less systematic.
He disgusts systems.
He thinks there's something indecent about
trying to encapsulate a human being or human
psyche within a systematic account.
Another aspect of that is his notion that
different moralities are appropriate for different
people, which he certainly had.
Wouldn't it be true to say-- well, in fact,
you have said it, I think, that he distrusted
rules.
He thought they hamstrung the strong.
They limited the creative.
Yes, yes.
He does believe that individual people are
entitled to individual kinds of behavior and
to individual bits of knowledge.
This is the most astonishing thing, and also,
I think in many ways, a very prophetic kind
of thing, that he believed that knowledge
was not absolute.
That the acquisition, the pursuit of knowledge
was not to be taken absolutely, but that a
given civilization had its own particular
entitlements to the kind of knowledge that
it could bear.
You see, the emphasis is on, it could bear
it.
He did envisage situations where knowledge
would destroy the knower.
A knowledge of nuclear fission, for example,
has become a lethal threat to us.
And that is something that Nietzsche would
very easily and very well have understood.
Yes, and he did, in fact, say so-- not about
nuclear physics, of course, but about knowledge
generally.
We only have really one other theory of knowledge
apart from our own.
Our own is that all knowledge is worth pursuing,
regardless, isn't it?
The other one is the Soviet idea which goes
on, and which simply creates a system by which
knowledge is socially useful, and then pursued
and not pursued if it's not socially useful.
Nietzsche's view is somewhat similar to this.
He does believe that given civilizations can
destroy themselves.
And the ground on which all this is erected
is, in fact-- we're coming back now to Socrates--
the Socratic yearn for knowledge, this driving
force which pushes us on.
Up to this point in our discussion, we've
talked about Nietzsche's critical enterprise,
his basic view that, up to this point in our
history, the morals, and values, and standards
of Western man have all been historically
based on belief in a God or in Gods who gave
us these values, gave us these moral standards
and would judge us by our failure to live
up to them or success in living up to them.
Now he comes along, he says, we've lost belief
in God.
We've lost belief in religion.
That means we've lost belief in the whole
foundation of our value system.
And if we're to have a valid value system,
we've got to re-evaluate it and re-found it
from the bottom up.
And we've talked to some of the various individual
critiques into which this led him.
I now want us to move on from this to the
next stage of the discussion, and in a sense,
it's the obvious question to ask, what were
his positive values?
Having, as it were, swept everything away
on a colossal scale, what is he now advocating
that we put in its place?
Well, the answer to that is a very simple
and a very complicated one both at the same
time.
The simple answer is be yourself at the top
of everything that you are to the hilt.
Live your life fully.
Live it adventurously, and all the other things
which later on come under the heading of [INAUDIBLE]
vital, in the human sphere, I mean.
That, essentially, the be thou thyself is
the major premise from which he begins.
It's also the goal towards which ethics ought
to be directed.
Now, you may ask was, of course, if everybody
is himself and himself alone, how is this
to be done in a wider sphere?
How is this to be done in a political system,
and so on?
The answers to that question are, I'm afraid,
very unsatisfactory as far as he's concerned.
As indeed, his whole attitude towards social
questions never does get very far.
Now, I said also that this is very, very complicated
precisely for this reason.
Because it makes living together in some kind
of harmony extremely difficult if you add
to this the view that laws are, after all,
there simply to make things easier for the
weak person.
You can see there's not very much purchase
to be got out of that either.
So it is, on the face of it, a simple system.
But, basically, I think there is a great deal
of difficulty facing anyone who's going to
put this forward.
In a sense, I think we can say that some of
the fascist politics of the early part of
this century is based, to some extent-- among
the intellectuals, at any rate-- on this view
that you must create your own values.
Well, it hasn't got us very far as you can
see.
But this notion that you must say, as he put
it, say yes to life, a firm life, be untrammeled
to the top of your bent, uninhibited, also
led him to the view that of course this is
going to lead you into conflict with other
people.
But you must simply sweep them aside.
You must sweep away the weak, and the unable,
and all those who, as it were, get in your
way.
That, of course, is absolutely flat head-on
in conflict with Christian morality, isn't
it?
Yes, it has.
But then, you see, you've only mentioned one
half of it.
The other part of it is you must also conquer
all that is comfortable, all that is cowardly,
all that is less than adventurous within yourself.
And if you've done that-- that is the view
that he puts forward in Zarathustra, for instance--
you won't really want to be so very aggressive
towards the others.
You will have some understanding of their
weaknesses.
Though the understanding of the positive,
the tolerant understanding of weaknesses is
not precisely Nietzsche's very strong point.
Not what he's very famous for.
Yes.
People, of course, have always been shocked
by his saying this.
And they thought that what he was advocating
was contrary to moral standards.
But his point, of course, was that, in fact,
moral standards ought to be derived from life,
ought to be subordinate to life, that our
notions of truth, and rationality, of all
the rest ought to derive from life, as such.
Or from the great man.
And by the great man, he meant, as I already
mentioned, Goethe would be one, Napoleon would
be another, sometimes Luther, sometimes even
some of the great Borgia Popes would figure
as that.
And sometimes even Socrates would, because
he had the strength of mind to carry through
his own project.
But this supremacy of life assertion and self-assertion
mean that even truth itself must be subjugated
to this.
If there are truths that would damage us,
that, in other words, would damage our lives,
then we don't want to know them.
You see we're back again at the question of
the entitlement to truth or at, what he once
called, the hygiene of knowledge.
There ought to be some kind of hygiene that
would tell us what kind of knowledge we may
face and what kind of knowledge we should
reject.
And you're quite right that truth itself,
in that way, is subjected to this kind of
embargo, to this kind of sanction that he
puts forward.
Well one sees absolutely how this is flat
contrary to all moralities that have actually
existed, would it be true to say that Nietzsche's
defence, if he deigned to defend himself against
criticism, would have been to say something
like this, but look, the whole of civilization,
humanity itself-- if you like, the whole evolutionary
process-- has consisted of the strong eliminating
the weak, the able eliminating the unable,
the intelligent eliminating the stupid.
And it's only because these processes have
gone on perpetually over millions of years
that we have any civilization at all, that
we have any humanity at all.
These things have created value.
Yes, I think that is precisely what he says
and what he would say on a number of occasions,
different contexts.
And his worry about the future is precisely
that this kind of thing will not go on.
That the Democratic spirit, the spirit of
the plebs, of the rabblement will take over
and will annihilate all these values.
That it will put into reverse the very process
that has actually created civilization out
of barbarism.
But in addition to that, I think we have put
bear in mind that he has a view of history
which is really rather different from the
view on which your analysis was based.
He sees history as repeating itself.
We shall talk about that a little later, but
what it essentially means is this, that any
historical situation can create and absorb
and make use of the highest that man is capable
of creating.
There aren't any privileged situations.
There are no privileged eras.
And therefore, any era that sees itself as
capable of fully understanding, of fully creating
these values should be allowed to do that.
And the trouble is, the late-19th century,
the early-20th century may very well be what
he calls eras of decadence, in which this
strength cannot be fully realized.
Now your mention of his doctrine that history
repeats itself brings me to what I would like
to think of as the next stage in our discussion.
When one comes to regard Nietzsche's later
work, there are four big themes in it.
And again, I think for clarity's sake, it
will help if we take them one at a time.
One is, what you might summarize under the
phrase, "the will to power," a phase which
he has popularized.
One is the uber-mensch, or translated as the
Superman, again, an invention of his that's
entered our language.
One is this doctrine you mention of the eternal
recurrence of time.
And the fourth, I would say, is his notion
of the aesthetic understanding of life.
Now, let's deal with those in order.
Let's talk first about the will to power,
which at one time he was going to give as
a title to the summation of his life's work.
What was this notion of his, the will to power?
Well, he takes the notion of will from your
own special philosopher Schopenhauer, of course,
and he reverses the evaluation of that.
Where Schopenhauer regarded the will as the
source of all evil in the world and as the
source of man's unhappiness, he regards it
as the source of man's strength.
And the cultivation, the permission to the
will to enact what it can enact is part of
a healthy culture.
Now the difficulty there, I think, is that
this obviously brings you in conflict with
other people.
And therefore, at this stage, the will to
power becomes a will to self-assertion, will
to usurpation of the other.
But that's so for that is to the will I think
is to be emphasized, not overemphasized as
some critics have done, that the will to power
also turns itself inward.
That is to say, it destroys within the self
all that is weak, all that is comfortable,
all that is the simply, yes, part of a man's
self-indulgence.
A kind of drastic bringing of oneself up to
the mark.
Up to the mark, which one has created oneself.
And this is the difficult--
One has created the mark.
The mark, oneself, that's right.
Well, now let's move on then to the next of
the four main themes of his later works, the
Superman.
Now, everybody knows the word "Superman,"
and it was, in fact, Nietzsche who invented
it.
It's been a very much misunderstood concept.
People have associated with the blond beast
of Hitlerian mythology and Nazi caricature.
But of course, that's not what he meant at
all, was it?
I think that is not what he meant at all.
I think the Superman is the man who can be
produced by any civilization.
Remember, I said that any era is capable of
bringing forth the maximum values that men
are capable of.
Superman is the man who lives, or that the
will to power will secure for him, lives it
to the full, is capable of repeating his own
willing ad infinitum.
We're already arriving at the doctrine that
was controversial of all the things, the most
bizarre, if you like, of these views, the
eternal recurrence.
Don't let's get that quite yet.
Because I want to unpack this notion of the
Superman, which has played such an enormous
role in thought in the last 100 years and
been so abused and misused by the Nazis, for
example.
Wouldn't it be truer to say that what Nietzsche
was actually trying to get at was the notion
of an unrepressed man and, if you like the
Freudian sense, a man who has reevaluated
his values, who is not living his life according
to false values, who is being to the top of
his best in an uninhibited, untrammeled free
spirit way.
Isn't that rather the notion?
Yes, I think that is so.
But it would be a man who, without, as it
were, respecting himself, would naturally
instinctively not do any of the things that
Nietzsche regards as evil.
For instance, the one category that comes
out unequivocally in his system is grudgingness,
is what he calls [INAUDIBLE], the grudging
admission of warmth, a grudging admission
of success, and all these kinds of things.
Now, the Superman is one who naturally does
not feel any of these things.
He's the generous spirit.
It is a generous spirit, yes.
And there, again, you see the whole notion
of the Christian generous spirit is not all
that far from Nietzsche's purview.
Now let us move on to the third of our four
main themes, and you've touched on it already,
this notion of the eternal recurrence.
Now, I would say that, if anything, of all
the doctrines of nature, this is the hardest,
not just for people to understand, but even
to take seriously.
I mean, on the face of it, he appears to be
saying that the whole of history moves in
vast epicycles, so that everything comes around
again, and again, and again, forever.
So that you and I have actually sat in this
studio, having this conversation innumerable
times before, and will do so innumerable times
again.
Now, is he really saying that?
Well, he's really saying that.
And he is trying out what might happen if
you took that view seriously.
And I think we want to say all together in
our whole discussion that a great deal of
his thinking is of this experimental kind.
And by that, I don't mean that he's not serious.
I don't mean that it is not responsible.
I don't mean that it is trivial.
But I do mean that here is somebody who's
facing the whole of human thought and is trying
to make some sort of shift with almost any
area in it, and is trying out again and again
different views.
There's a saying of his, I think a very tragic
saying of his, in a letter where he writes,
"I feel as though I were a new pin"-- a quill,
presumably-- "being tried out by some superior
power on a bit of paper."
It's a very strange thing to be feeling for
somebody who's advocating the will to power
and the Superman.
And yet, I think he did genuinely feel that.
Now, he does then try out this thought.
And it seems to me not so much a theory of
being, not so much a theory of the cosmos.
It seems to me a moral theory.
That is to say, our actions, our willing,
our intentions, our thoughts should be of
such a superior kind, of such a grand kind,
have such generosity and grandness about them
that we should not flinch to, and be able
to be willing to, repeat them over and over
again, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.
So, in other words, you're really only saying
yes to life, embracing life-- as he always
says we should-- if you would be willing to
do it over and over again [? at ?] what you're
doing now and only ever this.
Yes.
I think to go on very much further than that
and try to produce geometrical or mathematical
equations in order to prove, either the possibility
or the impossibility of these rules-- which
has been tried, has been done-- doesn't seem
to me to be terribly sensible.
In other words, it's a huge metaphor.
It is a huge metaphor.
And, of course, a great deal must be said
about Nietzsche's uses of metaphors.
Well, say just something about it, because
it's very relevant at this point.
Yes, I think we are in the habit of taking
things literally, in a way, in which doesn't
makes sense, as far as a great many of his
statements are concerned.
You spoke to begin with about his grand style.
And I think it is an extraordinary, powerful,
effective style.
If I ask myself where it derives from, I think
it derives from a strange invention, a strange
discovery he seems to have made of placing
his discourse, his language, somewhere halfway
between metaphor and literal meaning.
And this is something which very, very few
people-- certainly very few German writers--
have done before him.
He stands entirely on his own as far as thinking
is concerned.
You have mentioned that.
And we've seen how he attacks every tradition
in the West.
Where he does find his precursors is in the
style.
And Montaigne, and Pascal, and [INAUDIBLE]
are his favorite authors.
And that whole aphoristic style, I think,
derives a tremendous lot from them.
And it's not only me saying it.
It's himself saying it.
And this style, which is pitched halfway between
metaphor and literal statement, is something
quite extraordinary.
And I think, unless we understand it for what
it is, we are going to misread him.
I have a quotation which I think gives an
example of what I have in mind.
When he talked about the terrible deprivation
that he felt 19th century people experienced
through what he called, luridly, the death
of God, he wrote as follows.
He says, "Rather than cope with the unbearable
loneliness of their condition, men will continue
to seek their shattered God.
And for his sake, they will love the very
serpents that dwell among his ruins."
Now you see this mixture of, on the one hand,
conceptual thinking.
I mean, loneliness and condition are abstract
terms belonging to conceptual thought.
On the other hand, you've got the serpents
glistening somewhere through the ruins of
the shattered God.
And the refusal, I think, to go beyond that--
in other words, to write out the theory behind
the metaphors-- I think essentially constitutes
what he's about.
And it does give us, the readers, a problem.
This mix, this fusion of poetry and metaphor,
on the one hand, with hard concepts on the
other gives us a problem about how to take
him.
And that's really implicit in what you've
just been saying.
This leads to the fourth of the four themes
of the later philosophy.
We've talked now, briefly, about the will
to power, about the Superman, and about his
doctrine of the eternal recurrence of time.
What you've just been saying about his use
of metaphor leads us to the fourth of the
four main themes in the later work, which
is his notion that life is to be understood
aesthetically.
And I suppose the point here is that if there
is nothing outside this world-- no God, no
transcendent realm, or anything-- then any
meaning or justification that life has must
be meaning-derived from inside itself.
So that like a work of art-- the only meaning
a work of art has is what it, so to speak,
gives itself.
It doesn't derive it's meaning from outside.
Is that--
Well, that certainly is a very fair way of
coming close to what he's after.
In the very first of his book The Birth of
Tragedy, he uses this phrase three times,
"It's only as an aesthetic phenomenon that
the being of man and the world are eternally
justified."
It's a very complicated sentence.
And I don't think I want to go into all the
details of it.
But what he's saying, essentially, is this.
The greatness of the early Greeks, of the
pre-Socratics, lay in their tragedy.
Their tragedy was a way of facing the worst
aspects of human life, that is its transitoriness,
its impermanence, its corruptness, its dependence
upon forces greater than yourself, and to
make of these a major tale, a story, a wonderful
tragedy.
And this he applies in the largest, in the
most comsic possible sense.
And he's asking, as indeed, I think Shakespeare
did occasionally, is the whole world really
to be taken seriously?
Or is it not a great game, a great play, some
kind of drama played out by we do not know
who?
And if there is to be a justification-- mind
you, justification is the phrase he uses,
which is a very dicey word to use in this
context.
Because, of course, it's a judicial phrase,
isn't it?
But if there is a justification for man being
here and being what he is maybe it is simply
as part of this huge, cosmic drama.
And a great deal of his thought-- and I think
of some of his most interesting and greatest
thought-- goes precisely into rehearsing and
trying to make sense of this aesthetic justification
of man.
Now, you're talking about the way metaphor
and aesthetic considerations are fused into
the very substance of the thought itself.
And you spoke very interestingly, a moment
or two ago, about his actual style and the
tradition to which related.
It, in its turn, has had immense influence,
hasn't it?
I instanced some of the great creative writers
that he has influenced in my introduction
to this program.
Now, your particular field of expertise, if
I may say so, is known to be comparative literature,
it would be extremely interesting, I think,
to end this discussion with just a word or
two from you about the way Nietzsche, and
his writing, and his philosophy have influenced
creative writers since him.
Well, simply to take the three names that
you yourself mentioned, W.B.
Yeats is the first one.
Yeats read Nietzsche for the first time in
very brief, little excerpts translated by
a man called John Common, of all things.
It seems to me a most inappropriate name for
a translation of Nietzsche.
And from 1902 onwards when he read him, I
think there is a very clear change in the
general tenor and in the attitude of Yeats'
poetry.
And that slightly sultry, slightly sentimental,
yellow roses kind of poetry of [INAUDIBLE]
Yeats changes very much.
And the great poetry-- which is the poetry
as Yeats himself calls it the poetry of blood
and mire-- I think is very strongly influenced
by his reading of Nietzsche, by his attempts
to grasp some of the problems that we discussed
earlier on.
With Shaw, the influence is a very, very different
one.
It is very much in the biological sphere.
It is in the sphere of that [INAUDIBLE] vital
which I mentioned.
It is in the sphere of the ruthless life,
the life that justifies itself.
And with D.H. Lawrence, I think, again, it
is the question of authenticity.
Now the authenticity, as Lawrence conceives
it, is a very different kind of authenticity
from the one that Nietzsche had in mind.
In other words, it's social and sexual.
And, of course, both of these are really rather
minor factors in Nietzsche.
But it is certainly from Nietzsche, through
his wife Frieda Lawrence, that he acquired
some knowledge of Nietzsche and that he was
deeply influenced by it.
In a very late and, I think, rather dreadful
Christ story of Lawrence's seems to me to
drive straight out of Nietzsche's psychologizing
of the Christ figure.
If we look on the continent, of course, Pirandello,
Thomas Mann, Andre Malraux, all these people
not only have been very strongly under his
influence, but they acknowledge the influence
throughout.
Strindberg had a long correspondence through
a common friend with Nietzsche, and so on.
I think there are immensely powerful influences.
But we have to bear in mind that the aphoristic
style, the tremendous attractiveness of the
metaphors, the brevity of the message-- and
literary persons don't like to read heavy
books, they like to read aphorisms-- all these
play very much into Nietzsche's hand.
One last question, professor Stern, I don't
think we can finish our discussion without
touching on it.
If you say the name Nietzsche to most educated
people in the West nowadays, what they immediately
think of is the Nazis.
And the Nazis seem to have appropriated Nietzsche
as their philosopher, in the same sort of
way as they appropriated Wagner as their composer.
And that's had the effect ever since of contaminating
the reputation of those two geniuses in the
minds of large numbers of people.
Now, is it fair or is it unfair to associate
Nietzsche with fascism?
I think he must be associated with it to some
extent, and fascism rather than national socialism.
It was Mussolini who read him extensively,
who received a copy of the collected works
from the fuhrer on the Brenner in 1938 as
a present.
Hitler himself, I think, probably knew phrases--
I mean, certainly knew phrases like "the will
to power", but hadn't read anything of his.
I think, in some ways, this is a justifiable
charge.
And I would put it this way, that to the extent
that these parties depended upon their intellectuals,
and to the extent that the intellectuals depended
upon some sort of moralist ill-assorted ideology,
Nietzsche was part of it.
But of course, at the same time, I think it's
to be emphasized very strongly there are much
more important things in him which are absolute
anathema to these people-- to these gangsters,
let's put it quite plainly.
And self-control, and the inward struggle
of the self, and the attainment of generosity,
for instance, and greatness, of the kind that
we have described, have nothing whatever to
do with the kind of murderous ideologies that
came into being in the Third Reich and early
on among the Italians.
And it's quite plain from the fact that you
yourself have devoted so much of your life
to studying Nietzsche and writing about him
that you think this is a hugely valuable undertaking,
nevertheless.
Yes, I certainly think it is an immensely
valuable undertaking, providing we do not
go to it with some expectation of getting
a panacea on how to live right.
But provided we go into it with a view to
finding out what human beings can do, what
the human possibility is, what the being of
man is capable of understanding and creating
from within itself.
Thank you very much, professor Stern.
Thank you, I enjoyed myself very much.
