The Portable Nietzsche (2 page)

Mitleid
has almost invariably been rendered by “pity,” although “compassion” would have the advantage that it too means literally “suffering with.” The two English terms, however, do not have entirely the same meaning, and it is no accident that Aristotle, Spinoza, and La Rochefoucauld, of whose precedent Nietzsche makes much, have all been translated in the past as criticizing
“pity.”
And “pity” alone suggests the strong possibility of obtrusiveness and condescension apart from which Nietzsche's repugnance cannot be understood. Again, it would not do to alternate the terms: pity, as Zarathustra's “final sin,” is one of the central themes of Part Four, in which many statements about pity in Part Two are quoted or alluded to; and such later works as
Twilight of the Idols
and
The Antichrist
explicate the symbolism of
Zarathustra
. Nietzsche, in short, is not only a brilliant writer but also a philosopher who employs certain key terms, which must be rendered consistently. But the problem is even more deeply rooted than has been suggested so far.

After publication, many writers cut the umbilical cord and are ready for another conception. Nietzsche's works, however, are not independent creations. In the first place, Nietzsche wrote, to use his own phrase, with his blood: each book is part of the man, and the resulting existential unity makes all of them part of a single work. Each aphorism looks as if it could be understood by itself—and up to a point, of course, it can be—but in fact not even the books can be understood in isolation from one another. Nietzsche himself insisted on this point and underlined it by frequent quotations from, and allusions to, his earlier works. These internal echoes add essential overtones and are important clues to Nietzsche's meaning. This is another reason for consistency in translating certain words and phrases.

That Nietzsche did not dissociate himself from his published works but kept living with them is surely due in part to the fact that publication was in no case a major experience: for all the response he got, or rather did not get, the books might just as well never have been published at all. They did not become public property but remained his own—as children who fail to find a place in the world continue to be of special concern to their parents. The self-quotations are sometimes, at least in part, attempts to advertise himself. But it is far more fruitful to look at them, and at the far more numerous allusions, as leitmotifs.

Taking their cue from Wagner's leitmotifs, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig have pointed out, in connection with their remarkable German translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, that the style of the Old Testament often depends on
Leitworte
, words which are central and particularly emphasized in one passage and then picked up again elsewhere, thus establishing an unobtrusive cross reference—an association which, even if only dimly felt, adds dimension to the meaning. Perhaps no major writer is as biblical in this respect as Nietzsche.

A professor of philosophy who favored my
Nietzsche
with a most flattering review regretted one lapse “in linguistic usage”—“the most unkindest cut of all.” Shakespeare, of course, is generally better known than this, but some apparent lapses in this volume might well be due to the fact that Nietzsche knew the Bible so much better than many people today. Certainly he knew it better than one of his chief translators, who converted publicans into “toll-gatherers,” the Last Supper into “The Supper,” “unknown god” into “unfamiliar god,” and so on. When Zarathustra speaks of trying the reins, the archaism is surely preferable to having him test kidneys.

Nietzsche's style is not Teutonic but European, and more than that: he alludes freely to the books that constitute our Western heritage, from Homer to Dostoevski, and he sprinkles his prose with French and Latin phrases. There is something very modern in this: in his own phrase, Nietzsche was indeed a good European. But he never comes as close to patchwork as Eliot in
The Waste Land
, and he holds a reasonable mean between the cryptograms of the later Joyce and the obtrusive erudition of Toynbee, who underlines every allusion to the Bible with a footnote. Moreover, Nietzsche, unlike Joyce, almost invariably supplies a surface meaning too, and recognition of his allusions reveals a multi-dimensional style of writing and thinking, unlike Toynbee's.

It is not only his attitude toward religion that ranges Nietzsche far closer to Joyce than to Toynbee: there is also his addiction to plays on words, which probably poses the greatest single problem for the translator, especially in
Zarathustra
. But more of that in the editor's preface to that work. Suffice it to say here that it is impossible to be faithful to the content while sacrificing the form: meaning and mood are inseparable. If the translator makes things easy for himself and omits a play on words, he unwittingly makes a lighthearted pun or rhyme look serious, if he does not reduce the whole passage to nonsense. And he abets the common misconception of the austere Nietzsche, when, in fact, no other philosopher knew better how to laugh at himself.

Those who browse in this volume will find a conglomeration where anyone reading it straight through will likely find one of the most fascinating men of all time: a man as multi-dimensional as his style, profound and then again piteous, as tragic as he is widely supposed to have been, but no less comic—almost as different from his popular caricatures as a character in Shakespeare, or more likely in Dostoevski, is from the comic strip version of Superman. In his own formula:
Ecce homo!

Nietzsche was born in 1844; lost his father, a Lutheran minister, in 1849; spent his childhood surrounded by his mother, sister, grandmother, and two maiden aunts; was sent to a first-rate boarding school, Schulpforta; and proceeded to the universities of Bonn and Leipzig to study classical philology. Our knowledge of his youth rests largely on his sister's later hagiographies, but the twenty-four-year-old comes to life for us in the recommendation that earned him a professorship at Basel. The writer was Friedrich Ritschl, a generally conservative professor at Leipzig.

“However many young talents I have seen develop under my eyes for thirty-nine years now,
never yet
have I known a young man, or tried to help one along in my field as best I could, who was so mature as early and as young as this Nietzsche. His
Museum
articles he wrote in the second and third year of his
triennium.
He is the first from whom I have ever accepted any contribution at all while he was still a student. If—God grant—he lives long enough, I prophesy that he will one day stand in the front rank of German philology. He is now twenty-four years old: strong, vigorous, healthy, courageous physically and morally, so constituted as to impress those of a similar nature. On top of that, he possesses the enviable gift of presenting ideas, talking freely, as calmly as he speaks skillfully and clearly. He is the idol and, without wishing it, the leader of the whole younger generation of philologists here in Leipzig who—and they are rather numerous—cannot wait to hear him as a lecturer. You will say, I describe a phenomenon. Well, that is just what he is—and at the same time pleasant and modest. Also a gifted musician, which is irrelevant here.”

But Nietzsche had not yet fulfilled his residence requirement and hence had no doctorate. So Ritschl expected the case to be hopeless, “although in the present instance,” he wrote, “I should stake my whole philological and academic reputation that the matter would work out happily.” It is hardly surprising that Basel decided to ignore the “formal insufficiency.” Ritschl was delighted: “In
Germany
, that sort of thing happens absolutely never.” And he felt he should further describe his protégé.

“Nietzsche is not at all a specifically political nature. He may have in general, on the whole, some sympathy for the growing greatness of Germany, but, like myself, no special
tendre
for Prussianism; yet he has vivid feeling for free civic and spiritual development, and thus certainly a heart for your Swiss institutions and way of living. What more am I to say? His studies so far have been weighted toward the history of Greek literature (of course, including critical and exegetical treatment of the authors), with special emphasis, it seems to me, on the history of Greek philosophy. But I have not the least doubt that, if confronted by a practical demand, with his great gifts he will work in other fields with the best of success. He will simply be able to do anything he wants to do.”

Nietzsche was quite ready to work in other fields. He had read Schopenhauer as well as Greek philosophy; he was deeply moved by Wagner's music, especially the “shivery and sweet infinity” of
Tristan
; and no doctor's degree, conferred hurriedly without examination, and no professorship could for a moment give him the idea that he had “arrived.” He was very conscientious when it came to his varied teaching duties and carried an exceedingly heavy load without demur, but his mind soared beyond the academic pale, and his first book was not designed to place him in the front rank of German philology.

His years at Basel, where Nietzsche was the younger colleague of Jacob Burckhardt and of Franz Overbeck, who remained his lifelong friend, were soon interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War. Nietzsche, by now a Swiss subject, volunteered as a medical orderly and served briefly before returning in shattered health. Without waiting for complete recovery he plunged into an even heavier schedule than before and divided his remaining time between visits to Richard Wagner in Tribschen, near Lucerne, and his first book, published in 1872:
The Birth of Tragedy
. The topic was the sudden birth and no less sudden death of tragedy among the Greeks. The thesis: born of music, it died of that rationalism which found its outstanding incarnation in Socrates and which is evident in the works of Euripides. The significance: an iconoclastic conception of the Greeks, far removed from the “noble simplicity and calm grandeur” of Winckelmann and Goethe, then still popular. The style: an essay, now brilliant, now florid —without any scholarly apparatus. The greatest weakness: to the fifteen sections on Greek tragedy, Nietzsche added another ten on Wagner and his new music dramas, thus giving the whole work the appearance of mere special pleading for his idol. Forty years later the great British classicist F. M. Cornford was to hail the book as “a work of profound imaginative insight, which left the scholarship of a generation toiling in the rear.” But most of the philologists of Nietzsche's own generation considered the book preposterous. What it is best known for today is its contrast between the Apollinian (the serene sense of proportion which Winckelmann had so admired and which found its crowning expression in Greek sculpture) and the Dionysian (that flood which breaks through all restraints in the Dionysian festivals and which finds artistic expression in music). In Nietzsche's later works the Dionysian no longer signifies the flood of passion, but passion controlled as opposed to passion extirpated, the latter being associated with Christianity.

In the following pages no attempt has been made to carve excerpts out of this essay. Instead the almost complete text of
Homer's Contest
has been offered—a fragment of 1872 that should be of greater help for an understanding both of Nietzsche's early conception of ancient Greece and of his subsequent intellectual development.

His later works made not the least pretense of any connection, however slight, with his academic field. While carrying on with his academic duties as before, he followed his first book with four
Untimely Meditations.
In 1873 he vivisected David Strauss's highly successful
The Old and the New Faith.
The following year he published reflections
On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life,
as well as a meditation on
Schopenhauer as Educator;
and in 1876, shortly before his break with Wagner, an essay on the composer. This was Nietzsche's formative period, represented here by a few notes and another particularly striking fragment.

All of the later books are represented in this volume, each prefaced by a brief editorial note—a little longer in the case of works offered unabridged.

There are, first, the aphoristic works, beginning with
Human, All-Too-Human
and ending with
The Gay Science.
The two great events in this period of Nietzsche's life were his break with Wagner and his departure from the university. When the composer, no longer the lonely genius of Tribschen, became the center of a cult at Bayreuth, and his influence was widely felt not only
in musicis,
Nietzsche left him. The jingoism and anti-Semitism, which had seemed relatively unimportant personal idiosyncrasies, now called for a clear stand. Moreover Wagner, fond of Nietzsche as a brilliant and likable professorial ally, had no interest in him as a writer and thinker in his own right and stood in the way of Nietzsche's development. These factors, rather than Nietzsche's growing reservations about Wagner's music, precipitated the breach.
Parsifal
merely sealed it —and not because it was Christian but because Nietzsche considered it an essentially insincere obeisance. Wagner, the disciple of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer, the two great atheists, used medieval Christianity for theatrical effect; the self-styled modern Aeschylus glorified the antithesis of all Greek ideals, the “pure fool”; a composer whose personal worldly ambition knew no bounds wrote
Parsifal
. If the friendship had given Nietzsche some of the happiest days of his life, the break was one of his most painful experiences; and if the personal contact had done its share to raise his horizon beyond philology and classical antiquity, the breach spurred his ambition to rival and excel the composer and dramatist as a writer and philosopher.