Who Am I and If So How Many? (2 page)

Richard David Precht

Ville de Luxembourg

March 2007

Once upon a time, in a faraway corner of the universe, poured out and glistening in infinite solar systems, there was a constellation in which clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant and devious minute of ‘world history’: but still only a minute. After just a few breaths that nature took, the constellation froze, and the animals had to die.  

Someone could invent a fable of that sort and still not illustrate adequately how wretched, how shadowy and volatile, how purposeless and random human intellect appears within nature. There have been eternities when it was not there; when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its owner and creator gives it such dramatic importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, we would learn that it floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within it the flying center of the world.

Man is a clever animal with an overinflated sense of self, and a mind focused not on the great truths, but only on life’s minutiae. Rarely has any text in the history of philosophy held a mirror to man that was so poetic, yet so harsh. These lines, possibly the most beautiful opening lines of any philosophical work, were written in 1873 and published posthumously as the beginning of an essay called ‘On Truth and Falsehood in an Extramoral Sense.’ The author wrote it as a young professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at the age of twenty-nine.

But Friedrich Nietzsche never published his text about the clever and haughty animals that humans are. When he wrote it, he had just sustained deep wounds after publishing a book about the foundations of Greek culture, which his critics attacked as unscientific, speculative nonsense – and they were essentially correct. At the time, Nietzsche was spurned as a prodigy who had failed to live up to his promise, and his reputation as a classical philologist lay in ruins.

His life had gotten off to a promising start. Little Fritz, who was born in the Saxon village of Röcken in 1844 and grew up in Naumburg an der Saale, was considered a highly gifted and devoted student. His father was a Lutheran pastor, and his mother was also devout. When he was four years old, his father died, and shortly thereafter his younger brother died as well. His family then moved to Naumburg, and Nietzsche grew up in a household of women. Even in elementary school, Nietzsche’s talents were startlingly evident. Nietzsche attended Schulpforta, an elite
boarding
school, and in 1864, he enrolled at the University of Bonn to study classical philology. He gave up his second major field of study, theology, after one semester. He would have been happy to do his mother the favor of becoming a pastor, but he lacked religious conviction. Eventually, the ‘little pastor,’ as his
schoolmates
had mockingly called him, fell away from the faith. But while he tried to free himself from the prison of his mother’s expectations, the parsonage, and faith, he remained racked with guilt for the rest of his life. After a year, Nietzsche followed his
professor to Leipzig. His professor, who was a surrogate father to him, thought so highly of Nietzsche that he endorsed him for a faculty appointment at the University of Basel. In 1869, the twenty-four-year-old became an associate professor, and the university granted him his missing diplomas and doctoral and postdoctoral credentials. In Switzerland, Nietzsche got to know the scholars and artists of his time, most notably Richard Wagner and his wife, Cosima, whom he had already met briefly in Leipzig. Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Wagner’s grandiose music was so great that it inspired him to write an equally grandiose book in 1872:
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music.

Nietzsche’s book was brushed aside by his contemporaries. The distinction that Nietzsche drew between the alleged ‘Dionysian’ spirit of music and ‘Apollonian’ nature of the fine arts was hardly new – it had been in common use since the early Romantic period – and by the standards of historical truth it seemed wildly speculative. Also, at that time, European scholars were coming to terms with the birth of a far more significant tragedy. One year earlier, the British theologian and renowned botanist Charles Darwin had published
The Descent of Man
. Although the notion that man could have evolved from earlier primitive forms of life had been under discussion for at least twelve years – Darwin had claimed that his
Origin of Species
would ‘throw some light’ on the origin of man – the book caused a sensation. In the 1860s, numerous naturalists had drawn the same conclusions and classified man as a close relative of the recently discovered gorilla. The Church, particularly in Germany, fought Darwin and his followers all the way up to World War I, although it was clear from the start that there could be no going back to the earlier view of the world. The notion of God as a personal creator and guide of man had been laid to rest. The natural sciences celebrated their triumphant progress with a new down-to-earth image of man. People were more interested in apes than in God, and the lofty image of man as a godlike creature was replaced by the simple truth of man as an intelligent animal.

Nietzsche was keenly interested in this new view of life. ‘All we need,’ he later wrote, ‘is a
chemistry
of moral, religious, aesthetic ideas and feelings, a chemistry of all those impulses that we ourselves experience in the great and small interactions of culture and society, indeed even in solitude.’ In the last third of the nineteenth century, numerous scientists and philosophers were hard at work on this ‘chemistry,’ a biological theory of existence without God. But the questions on Nietzsche’s mind were altogether different: What does the sober scientific view mean for man’s self-image? Does it render man larger or smaller? Does man stand to lose everything, or is something to be gained from seeing things more clearly? These questions formed the backdrop for his transcendent essay ‘On Truth and Falsehood.’

Nietzsche’s outlook on whether man had become smaller or larger varied according to his mood. If he was despondent – as was often the case – he grew subdued and contrite and preached what Thomas Carlyle called the ‘gospel of dirt’ (a contemptuous reference to Darwin’s explanation of man’s common ancestry with the apes), but when in high spirits, Nietzsche was seized by a proud pathos and dreamed of the
Übermensch
.

Nietzsche’s ambitious fantasies and the thundering
self-assurance
in his books were in stark contrast to his short and pudgy physical appearance. A defiant toothbrush mustache was intended to liven up and give a manlier look to his soft features, but the many illnesses he had endured since childhood made him look and feel weak. He was quite nearsighted and suffered from stomach ailments and severe migraine attacks. By the age of thirty-five, feeling like a physical wreck, he stopped teaching in Basel. A syphilis infection may have been what eventually finished him off.

In the summer of 1881, two years after leaving the university, Nietzsche happened upon his very own paradise, the small town of Sils Maria in the Upper Engadine in Switzerland. He was stirred and inspired by its marvelous landscape. In the years that followed, he traveled there again and again, taking long solitary walks and
hatching grandiose new ideas, many of which he committed to paper during the winter in Rapallo and on the Mediterranean coast, in Genoa and in Nice. Most of these writings display Nietzsche’s fiery intelligence and literary bent. He was a merciless critic who poked his fingers into the wounds of Western philosophy. As far as his own suggestions for a new epistemology and morality were concerned, he endorsed a half-baked social Darwinism and often wallowed in impressionistic kitsch. The more his texts swaggered, the more they missed the mark. He made a point of noting that ‘God is dead,’ but most of his contemporaries already knew that from Darwin and others.

In 1887, the penultimate year that Nietzsche gazed out onto the snowcapped peaks of Sils Maria, he rediscovered the theme of the limitations of human knowledge, which he had written about in his essay about the clever animals. His polemic
On the
Genealogy of
Morals opened with these words: ‘We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge – and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves – how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?’ Here, as elsewhere in his writings, he spoke of himself in the plural, as though discussing an extraordinary, newly discovered animal species: ‘
Our
treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are. We are constantly making for them, being by nature winged creatures and honey-gatherers of the spirit; there is one thing alone we really care about from the heart – “bringing something home.”’ He did not have much time left to do so. Two years later, Nietzsche suffered a breakdown in Turin. His mother came to get her forty-four-year-old son and brought him to a clinic in Jena. Later he lived with her, but he no longer wrote. When Nietzsche’s mother died eight years later, her mentally deranged son was moved to the apartment of his sister Elisabeth, with whom he had a strained relationship. On August 25, 1900, Nietzsche died in Weimar at the age of fifty-five.

Nietzsche’s self-confidence soared as he wrote: ‘I know my destiny. Someday my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous.’ But what was so tremendous about
Nietzsche that he would become arguably the most influential philosopher of the coming century?

Nietzsche’s great achievement lay in his unsparing yet spirited pronouncements. More passionately than any other philosopher before him, he showed how arrogantly and ignorantly man passes judgment on the world by employing the logic and truth of the human species. The ‘clever animals’ think they have an exclusive status, but Nietzsche insisted that man is just an animal whose thinking is determined by all that being an animal implies: drives and instincts, primitive will, and a limited intellect. Most philosophers in the West were wrong, he contended, to regard man as something special, as a kind of supercomputer of
self-knowledge
. Can man really know himself and objective reality? Philosophers had rarely questioned this, and had simply equated universal thought with human thought. It had always been assumed that man was not just some clever animal, but a being on an altogether different plane. The leading philosophers had systematically denied their animal nature even though it stared them in the face every morning when they shaved their beards and every evening when they crawled into bed seeking sexual gratification. They had built a barrier between man and animal, insisting that man’s reason and intellect and ability to think and form opinions privileged man over animals. Man’s physical existence was deemed of lesser importance.

For their lofty self-image to be correct, philosophers had to assume that God had provided man with outstanding cognitive faculties to read the truth about the world in the Book of Nature. But if God were dead, these faculties would not be faultless, but flawed, like every other product of nature. Nietzsche had read this idea in Arthur Schopenhauer: ‘We are simply temporal, finite, transient, dreamlike, fleeting beings like shadows. What could such beings do with an intellect that grasped the infinite, eternal, and absolute relations of things?’ The intellect, as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche presciently observed, was directly dependent on the demands of evolutionary adaptation. Man is able to grasp only what
the cognitive powers he was handed down in the course of evolution enable him to grasp. Just like any other animal, man models the world on what his senses and consciousness enable him to understand. One thing is clear: our knowledge derives first and foremost from our senses. We cannot register what we cannot hear, see, feel, taste, and touch, hence it does not enter into our world. Even the most abstract things have to be read or seen in the form of signs to enable us to imagine them. For a completely objective view of the world, man would need a truly
superhuman
sensorium that taps the full potential of sensory perceptions: the sharp vision of the eagle, the keen sense of smell of the bear, the lateral line system of the fish, the seismographic abilities of the snake. But because humans have none of these features, they cannot gain an objective outlook. Our world is never the world ‘in itself’ any more than the world envisioned by a dog or a cat, a bird or a beetle is. ‘The world, my son,’ says the father fish in the aquarium to his son, ‘is a big tank full of water!’

Nietzsche’s brutally frank assessment of philosophy and religion had revealed the hyperbolic nature of most self-definitions of man. (The fact that he himself created new hyperboles and tensions is another matter.) Human consciousness was shaped not by a burning desire for truth but by an attempt to survive and move ahead. Anything immaterial to that attempt would fall by the wayside in human evolution. Nietzsche held out a vague hope that this very self-discovery could make man cleverer, could perhaps create an
Übermensch
who truly expands the parameters of his knowledge. But here, too, caution is surely the better path than pathos. Any insight into human consciousness and its ‘chemistry,’ which, as we will see, has made enormous strides since Nietzsche, and even the most ingenious measuring devices and keenest observations, do nothing to change the fact that man can never attain purely objective knowledge.

But is that really so terrible? Might it not be far worse if man knew everything about himself? Do we really need a truth that hovers over our heads? Sometimes traveling down the path of
knowledge is pleasant in and of itself, particularly when such a thrilling and labyrinthine road ends up leading us to ourselves. ‘We have never sought ourselves – how could it happen that we should ever
find
ourselves?’ Nietzsche had written in the
Genealogy of
Morals
. So let us embark on a journey to find ourselves as best we can. What path should we take? What method should we use? And what might we find at the end? If all our knowledge depends on and takes place within our vertebrate brains, it is probably best to start there. So our first question is: Where does our brain come from, and why is it constructed the way it is?