VI

Consolation for Difficulties

1.  Few philosophers have thought highly of feeling wretched. A wise

life has traditionally been associated with an attempt to ."duce

suffering: anxiety, despair, anger, self-contempt and heartache.

2.  Then again, pointed out Friedrich Nietzsche, the majority of

philosophers have always been 'cabbage-heads'. 'It is my fate to

have to be the first decent human being,' he recognized with a

degree of embarrassment in the autumn of 1888. 'I have a terrible

fear that I shall one day be pronounced holy', and he set the date

somewhere around the dawn of the third millennium; 'Let us

assume that people will be allowed, to read [my work] in about the

year 2000.' He was sure they would enjoy it when they did:

It seems to me that to take a book of mine inro his hands is one of

the rarest distinctions that an /one can confer upon himself. I even

assume that he removes his shoes when he does so - not to speak of

boots.

A distinction because, alone among the cabbage-heads, Nietzsche

had realized that difficulties of every sort were to be welcomed by

those seeking fulfilment;

You want if possible — and there is no madder 'if possible' — to

abolish suffering; and we? - it really does seem that we would rather

increase it and make it worse than it has ever been!

Though punctilious in sending his best wishes to friends, Nietzsche

knew in his heart what they needed:

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish

suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities -1 wish that

they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt,

the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished.

Which helped to explain why his work amounted to, even if he said

so himself:

The greatest gift that [mankind] has ever been given.

3

We should not be frightened by appearances.

In the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time... usually we are

nothing more than a single individual which leaps to the eye and

determines the whole impression we make. Thus the gentlest and most

reasonable of men can, if he wears a large moustache.. . usually be seen as no

more than the appurtenance of a large moustache, that is to say a military

type, easily angered and occasionally violent - and as such he wil be treated.

4

He had not always thought so well of difficulty. For his initial

views, he had been indebted to a philosopher he had discovered at

the age of twenty-one as a student at Leipzig University. In the

autumn of 1865, in a second-hand bookshop in Leipzig's Blumen-

gasse, he had by chance picked up an edition of The World as Will

and Representation, whose author had died five years previously in

an apartment in Frankfurt 300 kilometres to the west:

I took [Schopenhauer's book] in my hand as something totally

unfamiliar and turned the pages. I don't know which daimon was

whispering to me: 'Take this book Home.' In any case, it happened,

which was contrary ro my custom of otherwise never rushing into

buying a book Back .it the house I threw myself into the corner of

a sofa with my new :: easure, and began to let that dynamic, dismal

genius work on me. Each line cried out with renunciation,

negation, resignation.

The older man changed the younger one's life. The essence of

philosophical wisdom was, Schopenhauer explained, Aristotle's

remark in the Nicomachean Ethics'.

The prudent man strives for freedom from pain, not pleasure.

The priority for all those seeking contentment was to recognize the

impossibility of fulfilment and so to avoid the troubles and anxiety

that we typically encounter in its pursuit:

[We should] direct our aim not to what is pleasant and agreeable in

life, but to the avoidance, as far as possible, of its numberless evils

. . . The happiest lot is that of the man who has got through life

without any very great pain, bodily or mental.

When he next wrote Home to his widowed mother and his nine-

teen-year-old sister in Naumburg, Nietzsche replaced the usual

reports on his diet and the progress of his studies with a summary

of his new philosophy of renunciation and resignation:

We know that life consists of suffering, rhat the harder we try to

enjoy it, the more enslaved we are by it. -md so we [should] discard

the goods of life and practise abstinence.

It sounded strange to his mother, who wore back explaining that

she didn't like 'that kind of display or that kind of opinion so much

as a proper letter, full of news', and advised her son to entrust his

heart to God and to make sure he was eating properly.

But Schopenhauer's influence did not subside. Nietzsche began

to live cautiously. Sex figured prominently in a list he drew up

under the heading 'Delusions of the Individual'. During his military

service in Naumburg, he positioned a photograph of Schopenhauer

on his desk, and in difficult moments cried out, 'Schopenhauer,

help!' At the age of twenty-four, on taking up the Chair of Classical

Philology at Basle University, he was drawn into the intimate circle

of Richard and Cosima Wagner through a common love of the

pessimistic, prudent sage of Frankfurt.

5

Then, after more than a decade of attachment, in the autumn of

1876, Nietzsche travelled to Italy and underwent a radical change of

mind. He had accepted an invitation from Malwida von Meysenbug,

a wealthy middle-aged enthusiast of the arts, to spend

a few months with her and a group of friends in a villa in Sorrento

on the Bay of Naples.

'I never saw him so lively. He laughed aloud from sheer joy,'

reported Malwida of Nietzsche's first response to the Villa

Rubinacci, which stood on a leafy avenue on the edge of Sorrento.

From the living room there were views over the bay, the island of

Ischia and Mount Vesuvius, and in front of the house, a small

garden with fig and orange trees, cypresses and grape arbours led

down to the sea.

The house guests went swimming, and visited Pompeii,

Vesuvius, Capri and the Greek temples at Paestum. At mealtimes,

they ate light dishes prepared with olive oil, and in the evenings,

read together in the living room: Jacob Burckhardt's lectures on

Greek civilization, Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues,

La Bruyere, Stendhal, Goethe's ballad Die Brant von Korinth, and his

play Die naturliche Techier, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato's

Laws (though, perhaps spurred on by Montaigne's confessions of

distaste, Nietzsche grew irritated with the latter: The Platonic dia-

logue, that dreadfully self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectics.

can only have a stimulating effect if one has never read any good

Frenchmen ... Plato is boring').

And as he swam in the Mediterranean, ate food cooked in olive

oil rather than butter, breathed warm air and read Montaigne and

Stendhal (These little things - nutriment, place, climate, recre-

ation, the whole casuistry of selfishness - are beyond all conception

of greater importance than anything that has been considered of

importance hitherto'), Nietzsche gradually changed his philosophy

of pain and pleasure, and with it, his perspective on difficulty.

Watching the sun set over the Bay of Naples at the end of October

1876, he was infused with a new, quite un-Schopenhauerian faith in

existence. He felt that he had been old at the beginning of his life,

and shed tears at the thought that he had been saved at the last

moment.

6

He made a formal announcement of his conversion in a letter to

Cosima Wagner at the end of 1876: 'Would you be amazed if I con-

fess something that has gradually come about, but which has more

or less suddenly entered my consciousness: a disagreement with

Schopenhauer's teaching? On virtually all general propositions I am

not on his side.'

One of these propositions being that, because fulfilment is an

illusion, the wise must devote themselves to avoiding pain rather

than seeking pleasure, living quietly, as Schopenhauer counselled,

'in a small fireproof room' - advice that now struck Nietzsche as

both timid and untrue, a perverse attempt ro dwell, as he was to

put it pejoratively several years later, 'hidden in forests like shy

deer'. Fulfilment was to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by

recognizing its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to

reaching anything good.

7

What had, besides the food and the air, helped to change

Nietzsche's outlook was his reflection on the few individuals

throughout history who appeared genuinely to have known ful-

filled lives; individuals who could fairly have been described - to

use one of the most contested terms in the Nierzschean lexicon - as

Ubermenschen.

The notoriety and absurdity of the word owe less to Nietzsche's

own philosophy than to his sister Elisabeth's subsequent enchant-

ment with National Socialism ('rhat vengeful anti-Semiac goose',

as Friedrich described her long before she shook the Fiihrer's

hand), and the unwitting decision by Nietzsche's earliest Anglo-

Saxon translators to bequeath to the Ubermensch the name of a

legendary cartoon hero.

But Nietzsche's Ubermenschen had little to do with either airborne

aces or fascists. A better indication of their identity came in a pass-

ing remark in a letter to his mother and sister:

Really, there is nobody living about whom I care much. The people

I like have been dead for a long, ]ong time for example, the Abbe

Galiani, or Henri Beyle, or Montaigne.

He could have added another hero,Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

These four men were perhaps the richest clues for what Nietzsche

came in his maturity to understand by a fulfilled life.

They had much in common. They were curious, artistically gifted,

and sexually vigorous. Despite their dark sides, they laughed, and

many of them danced, too; they were drawn to 'gentle sunlight,

bright and buoyant air, southerly vegetation, the breath of the

sea [andJ fleeting meals of flesh, fruit and eggs'. Several of them

had a gallows humour close to Nietzsche's own - a joyful, wicked

laughter arising from pessimistic hinterlands. They had explored

their possibilities, they possessed what Nietzsche called 'life', which

suggested courage, ambition, dignity, strength of character,

humour and independence (and a parallel absence of sancti-

moniousness, conformity, resentment andprissiness).

They had been involved in the world. Montaigne had been

mayor of Bordeaux for rwo terms and journeyed across Europe on

horseback. The Neapolitan Abbe Galiani had been Secretary to the

Embassy in Paris and written works on money supply and grain

distribution (which Voltaire praised for combining the wit of

Moliere and the intelligence of Plato). Goethe h.id worked for a

decade as a civil servant in the Court in Weimar; he had proposed

reforms in agriculture, industry and poor relief, undertaken diplo-

matic missions and twice had audiences with Napoleon.

On his visit to Italy in 1787, he had seen the Greek temples at

Paestum and made three ascents of Mount Vesuvius, coming close

enough to the crater to dodge eruptions of stone and ash.

Nietzsche called him 'magnificent', 'the last German I hold in rev-

erence': 'He made use of ... practical activity ... he did not

divorce himself from life but immersed himself in it... [he] took as

much as possible upon himself... What he wanted was totality; he

fought against the disjunction of reason, sensuality, feeling, will'.

Stendhal had accompanied Napoleon's armies around Europe,

he had visited the ruins of Pompeii seven times and admired the

Pont du Gard by a full moon at five in the morning ('The Coliseum

in Rome hardly plunged me into a reverie more profound . . ').

Nietzsche's heroes had also fallen in love repeatedly. 'The whole

movement of the world tends and leads towards copulation'.

Montaigne had known. At the age of seventy-four, on holiday in

Marienbad, Goethe had become infatuated with Ulrike von

Levetzow, a pretty nineteen-year-old, whom he had invited out for

tea and on walks, before asking for (and being refused) her hand in

marriage. Stendhal, who had known and loved Werther, had been

as passionate as its author, his diaries detailing conquests across

decades. At twenty-four, stationed with the Napoleonic armies in

Germany, he had taken the innkeeper's daughter to bed and noted

proudly in his diary that she was 'the first German woman I ever

saw who was totally exhausted after an orgasm. I made her pas-

sionate with my caresses; she was very frightened.'

And finally, these men had all been artists (Art is the great stim-

ulant to life recognized Nietzsche), and must have felt extraordi-

nary satisfaction upon completing the Essa-is, R Socrate immaginario,

Romische Elegien and Dc I'amour.

These were, Nietzsche implied, some of the elements that human

beings naturally needed for a fulfilled life. He added an important

detail; that it was impossible to attain them without feeling very

miserable some of the time:

What if pleasure and displeasure were so lied together that whoever

-wanted to have as much as possible of ui-.. must also have as much

as possible of the other ... you have the choice: either as little dis-

pleasure as possible, painlessness in brief. . . or as much displeasure as