00 - Translators Introduction & Preface - Ecce Homo - Friedrich Nietzsche

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Translator's introduction. Eke Homo is the last prose work that
nietzschu wrote. It is true that the pamphlet Nietsure contra
Wagner was prepared a month later than the autobiography, But
we cannot consider this pamphlet as anything more than a compilation,
seeing that it consists entirely of aphorisms drawn from such

(00:25):
previous works as Joyful Wisdom, beyond Good and Evil, the
Genealogy of Morals, et cetera. Coming at the end of
a year in which he had produced the Case of Wagner,
The Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist, eke Homo
is not only a coping stone worthy of the wonderful

(00:48):
creations of that year, but also a fitting conclusion to
his whole life, in the form of a grand summing
up of his character as a man, his purpose as
a reformer, and his achievement as a thinker. As if
half conscious of his approaching spiritual end, Nietzsche here bids

(01:10):
his friend's farewell, just in the manner in which in
the Twilight of the Idols Aphorism thirty six, Part nine,
he declares that everyone should be able to take leave
of his circle of relatives and intimates when his time
seems to have come, that is to say, while he

(01:31):
is still himself, while he still knows what he is about,
and is able to measure his own life and life
in general, and speak of both in a manner which
is not vouchsafed to the groaning invalid, to the man
lying on his back, decrepid and exhausted, or to the

(01:56):
more abundant victim of some wasting disease. Nietzsch's spiritual death,
like his whole life, was in singular harmony with his doctrine.
He died suddenly and proudly soared in hand war which he,
and he alone, among all the philosophers of Christendom, had

(02:19):
praised so wholeheartedly, at last struck him down in the
full vigor of his manhood, and left him a victim
on the battlefield, the terrible battlefield of thought, on which
there is no quarter, and for which no Geneva convention
has yet been established or even thought of. To those

(02:42):
who know Nietzsch's life work, no apology will be needed
for the form and content of this wonderful work. They
will know at least that a man either is or
is not aware of his significance and of the significance
of what he has accomplished, and that if he is
aware of it, then self realization, even of the kind

(03:06):
which we find in these pages, is neither morbid nor suspicious,
but necessary and inevitable. Such chapter headings as why I
am so wise, why I am a fatality, why I
write such excellent books, however much they may have disturbed

(03:27):
the equanimity and objectivity in particular of certain nature biographers,
can be regarded as pathological only in a democratic age
in which people have lost all sense of gradation and rank,
and in which the virtues of modesty and humility had

(03:47):
to be preached far and wide as a corrective against
the vulgar pretensions of thousands of wretched nobodies. For little
people can be enjoyed only as modest citizens or humble Christians. If, however,
they demand a like modesty on the part of the

(04:08):
truly great, if they raise their voices against Nietzsche's lack
of the very virtue they so abundantly possess or pretend
to possess, it is time to remind them of Goeta's
famous remark nur Di Lupens sind bischeiden. Only nobodies are

(04:29):
ever modest. It took Nietzschere barely three weeks to write
this story of his life. Begun on the fifteenth of
October eighteen eighty eight, his four and fortieth birthday, it
was finished on the fourth of November of the same year, and,
but for a few trifling modifications and editions, is just

(04:53):
as Nietzsche left it. It was not published in Germany
until the year nineteen o eight, eight years after Nietzsa's death.
In a letter dated the twenty seventh of December eighteen
eighty eight, addressed to the musical composer Fuchs, the author
declares the object of the work to be to dispose

(05:15):
of all discussion, doubt, and inquiry concerning his own personality,
in order to leave the public mind free to consider
merely the things for the sake of which he existed.
Di dinger darend vingen ich darbin and true to his intention,
Nietzsche's honesty in these pages is certainly one of the

(05:38):
most remarkable features about them, From the first chapter, in
which he frankly acknowledges the decadent elements within him, to
the last page, whereon He characterizes his mission, his life task,
and his achievement by means of the one symbol Dionysus

(05:58):
versus Christ. Everything comes straight from the shoulder, without hesitation,
without fear of consequences, and above all, without concealment. Only
in one place does he appear to conceal something, and
then he actually leads one to understand that he is

(06:19):
doing so. It is in regard to Wagner, the greatest
friend of his life, who doubts. He says that I
old artillery man that I am, would be able if
I liked to point my heavy guns at Wagner. But
he adds everything decisive in this question, I kept to myself,

(06:44):
I have loved Wagner page one, two two. To point,
as many have done, to the proximity of all Nietzure's
autumn work of the year eighteen eighty eight, to his
breakdown at the beginning of eighteen eighty nine, and to
argue that, in all its main features it foretells the

(07:05):
catastrophe that is imminent. Seems a little too plausible, a
little too obvious and simple to require refutation that Nietzsche
really was in a state which in medicine is known
as euphoria, that is to say, that state of highest
well being and capacity which often precedes a complete breakdown. Cannot,

(07:30):
I suppose, be questioned for his style, his penetrating vision,
and his vigor reached the zenith in the works written
in this autumn of eighteen eighty eight. But the contention
that the matter the substance of these works reveals any
signs whatsoever of waning mental health, or, as a certain

(07:52):
French biographer has it, of an inability to hold himself
and his judgments in check, is best contradicted by the
internal evidence itself. To take just a few examples at random,
examine the cold and calculating tone of self analysis in

(08:14):
chapter one of the present work. Consider the reserve and
the restraint with which the idea in Aphorism seven of
that chapter is worked out, not to speak of the
restraint and self mastery in the idea itself, namely, to
be one's enemies equal. This is the first condition of

(08:37):
an honorable duel. Where one despises, one cannot wage war,
where one commands, where one sees something beneath one, one
ought not to wage war. My war tactics can be
reduced to four principles. First, I attack only things that

(08:58):
I triumphant. If necessary, I wait until they become triumphant. Secondly,
I attack only those things against which I find no allies,
against which I stand alone, against which I compromise nobody
but myself. Thirdly, I never make personal attacks. I use

(09:21):
a personality merely as a magnifying glass, by means of
which I render a general, but elusive and scarcely noticeable
evil more apparent. Fourthly, I attack only those things from
which all personal differences are excluded, in which any such

(09:41):
thing as a background of disagreeable experiences is lacking. And
now notice the gentleness with which, in chapter two Wagner,
the supposed mortal enemy and the supposed envid rival to Nietzschure,
is treated. Are these the words and the thoughts of

(10:04):
a man who has lost or who is losing control?
And even if we confine ourselves simply to the substance
of this work and put the question, is it a
new niature or the old nature that we find in
these pages? Is it the old countenance with which we

(10:25):
are familiar? Or are the features distorted, awry, disfigured? What
will the answer be? Obviously there is no new or
even deformed Nietzsche here, because he is still faithful to
the position which he assumed in thus spake Zarathustra five
years previously, and is perfectly conscious of this fidelity see

(10:50):
page one four one. Neither can he be even on
the verge of any marked change, because the whole of
the third chapter, in which he reviews his life work,
is simply a reiteration and a confirmation of his old
points of view, which are here made all the more

(11:11):
telling by additional arguments suggested no doubt by maturer thought.
In fact, if anything at all is new in this work,
it is its cruel certainty, its severe deliberateness, and its
extraordinarily incisive vision, as shown for instance in a summing

(11:33):
up of the genuine import of the third and fourth
essays in the Thoughts out of Season pages seventy five
to seventy six, eighty eighty one, and eighty two, a
summing up which are most critical analysis of the essays
in question, can but verify Romanticism, Idealism, Christianity are still

(11:59):
scorned and despised. Another outlook, a nobler, braver, and more
earthly outlook, is still upheld and revered. The great yay
to life, including all that it contains that is terrible
and questionable, is still pronounced in the teeth of pessimists, nihilists, anarchists,

(12:23):
Christians and other decadence, and Germany, Europe's flat land, is
still subjected to the most relentless criticism. If there are
any signs of change besides those of mere growth in
this work, they certainly succeed in eluding the most careful
search undertaken with a full knowledge of Nietzsche's former opinions,

(12:48):
and it would be interesting to know precisely where they
are found by those writers whom the titles of the
chapters alone seem so radically to have perturbed. But the
most striking thing of all, the miracle, so to speak,
of this autobiography, is the absence from it of that loathing,

(13:11):
that suggestion of serfet with which a life such as
the one Nietzsche had led would have filled any other man,
even of power approximate to his own. This anchorte, who,
in the last years of his life as a healthy
human being, suffered the experience of seeing even his oldest friends,

(13:34):
including Goroda, show the most complete indifference to his lot.
This wrestler with fate, for whom recognition in the persons
of Brannus, Taine and Strindberg have come all too late,
and whom even support, sympathy and help riving as it

(13:56):
did at last through Deussen and from Madame Darsalis, Marshal
could no longer cheer or comfort. This was the man
who was able, notwithstanding to inscribe the device amor fatty
upon his shield on the very eve of his final collapse,

(14:16):
as a victim of the unspeakable suffering he had endured.
And this final collapse might easily have been foreseen. Nietzsche's censorium,
as his autobiography proves, was probably the most delicate instrument
ever possessed by human being. And with this fragile structure

(14:38):
the prequisite by the bye of all genius, his terrible
will compelled him to confront the most profound and most
recondite problems we happen to know from another artist and
profound thinker, Benjamin Disraeli, who himself had experienced a dangerous breakdown.
What the consequences pressed icly are of indulging in excessive

(15:03):
activity in the sphere of the spirit, more particularly when
that spirit is highly organized. Disraeli says, in contraryy Fleming,
Part four, Chapter five, I have sometimes half believed, although
the suspicion is mortifying, that there is only one step

(15:25):
between his state, who deeply indulges in imaginative meditation and insanity.
For I will remember that at this period of my life,
when I indulge in meditation to a degree that would
now be impossible, and I hope unnecessary, my senses sometimes

(15:47):
appear to be wandering. And artists are the proper judges
of artists, not Oxford dons, like doctor Schiller, who, in
his impertent attempt at dealing with something for which his
pragmatic hands are not sufficiently delicate, eagerly avails himself of

(16:10):
popular help in his article on Nietzsche in the eleventh
edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and implies the hackneyed and
wholly exploded belief that Nietzsche's philosophy is madness in the making.
As German philosophies, however, are said to go to Oxford

(16:30):
only when they die, we may perhaps conclude from this
want of appreciation in that quarter, how very much alive
Nietzsche's doctrine still is not that Nietzsche went mad so soon,
but that he went mad so late is the wonder

(16:51):
of wonders. Considering the extraordinary amount of work he did,
the great task of the transvaluation of all values, which
he actually accomplished, and the fact that he enjoyed such
long years of solitude, which to him, the sensitive artist
to whom friends were everything, must have been a terrible hardship.

(17:14):
We can only wonder at his great health, and can
well believe his sister's account of the phenomenal longevity and
bodily vigor of his ancestors. No one, however, who is initiated,
No one who reads this work with understanding, will be
in need of this introductory note of mine, for to

(17:38):
all who know these pages must speak for themselves. We
are no longer in the nineteenth century. We have learned
many things since then, and if caution is only one
of these things, at least it will prevent us from
judging a book such as this one, with all its
apparent pontifical pride and surging self alliance, with undue haste,

(18:03):
or with that arrogant assurance with which the ignorance of
the humble and the modest has always confronted everything truly
great Antony M. Ludovici and of Translator's introduction preface one.

(18:29):
As it is my intention, within a very short time
to confront my fellow men with the very greatest demand
that has ever yet been made upon them, it seems
to me above all necessary to declare here who and
what I am. As a matter of fact, this ought

(18:50):
to be pretty well known already, for I have not
held my tongue about myself. But the disparity which obtains
between the greatness of my tak and the smallness of
my contemporaries is revealed by the fact that people have
neither heard me nor yet seen me. I live on

(19:10):
my own self made credit, and it is probably only
a prejudice to suppose that I am alive at all.
I do but require to speak to any one of
the scholars who come to the ober Enger Dean in
the summer in order to convince myself that I am
not alive under these circumstances. It is a duty and

(19:35):
one against which my customary reserve, and to still a
greater degree the brider my instincts rebel to say, listen,
for I am such and such a person. For Heaven's sake,
do not confound me with anyone else two. I am,

(19:56):
for instance, in no wise a bogey man or more
old monster. On the contrary, I am the very opposite
in nature to the kind of man that has been
honored hitherto as virtuous between ourselves. It seems to me
that this is precisely a matter on which I may

(20:16):
feel proud. I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus,
and I would prefer to be even a satier than
a saint. But just read this book. May be I
have here succeeded in expressing this contrast in a cheerful
and at the same time sympathetic manner. Maybe this is

(20:40):
the only purpose of the present work. The very last
thing I should promise to accomplish would be to improve mankind.
I do not set up any new idols. May old idols.
Only learn what it costs to have legs of clay
to overthrow idols. Idols is the name I give to

(21:04):
all ideals. Is much more like my business in proportion,
as an ideal world has been falsely assumed, reality has
been robbed of its value, its meaning, and its truthfulness.
The true world and the apparent world in plain English,

(21:25):
the fictitious world and reality hitherto the lie of the
ideal has been the curse of reality. By means of it,
the very source of mankind's instincts has become mendacious and false,
so much so that those values have come to be
worshiped which are the exact opposite of the ones which

(21:48):
would ensure man's prosperity, his future, and his great right
to a future. Three. He who knows how to breathe
in the air of my writings is conscious that it
is the air of the heights that it is bracing.
A man must be built for it, otherwise the chances

(22:10):
are it will chill him. The ice is near, the
loneliness is terrible. But how serenely everything lies in the sunlight,
how freely one can breathe, how much one feels lies
beneath one. Philosophy, as I have understood it, hitherto, is

(22:36):
a voluntary retirement into regions of ice and mountain peaks,
the seeking out of everything strange and questionable in existence,
everything upon which hitherto morality has set its ban. Through
long experience derived from such wanderings in forbidden country, I

(22:58):
acquired an opinion very different from that which may seem
generally desirable. Of the causes which hitherto have led to
men's moralizing and idealizing, the secret history of philosophers, the
psychology of their great names, was revealed to me. How

(23:21):
much truth can a certain mind endure? How much truth
can it dare? These questions became for me ever more
and more the actual test of values. Error, the belief
in the ideal, is not blindness. Error is cowardice. Every conquest,

(23:45):
every step forward in knowledge, is the outcome of courage,
of hardness towards one's self, of cleanliness towards one's self.
I do not refute ideals. All I do is to
draw on my gloves in their presence, nittimour inevetitum. With

(24:05):
this device, my philosophy will one day be victorious. For
that which has hitherto been most stringently forbidden is without
exception truth. Four In my life work, my Zarathustra holds
a place apart with it. I gave my fellow men

(24:29):
the greatest gift that has ever been bestowed upon them.
This book, the voice of which speaks out across the ages,
is not only the loftiest book on earth, literally the
book of mountain air. The whole phenomenon mankind lies at
an incalculable distance beneath it. But it is also the

(24:52):
deepest book, born of the inmost abundance of truth, an
inexhaustible well into which no picture can be lowered without
coming up again laden with gold and with goodness. Here
it is not a prophet who speaks one of those
gruesome hybrids of sickness and will to power, whom men

(25:15):
called founders of religion. If a man would not do
a sad wrong to his wisdom, he must above all
give proper heat to the tones, the halcionic tones that
fall from the lips of Zarathustra. The most silent words
are harbringers of the storm. Thoughts that come on dove's

(25:40):
feet lead the world. The figs fall from the trees.
They are good and sweet, and when they fall, their
redskins are rent a north wind, am I, and to
ripe figs. Thus, like figs, do these precepts drop down
to you? My friends, now drink their juice, their sweet pulp.

(26:01):
It is autumn all around, and clear sky and afternoon.
No fanatic speaks to you hear. This is not a sermon.
No faith is demanded in these pages. From out an
infinite treasure of light and well of joy. Drop by drop,

(26:22):
my words fall out. A slow and gentle gait is
the cadence of these discourses. Such things can reach only
the most elect It is a rare privilege to be
a listener here. Not everyone who likes can have ears
to hear. Zarathustra is not Zarathustra because of these things

(26:44):
a seducer. But what indeed does he himself say when
for the first time he goes back to his solitude,
just the reverse of that which any sage, saint, savior
of the world and other decadent would say, not only
his words, but he himself is other than they alone?

(27:11):
Do I know? Go my disciples, get ye also hence
and alone? Thus would I have it? Verily? I beseech
you take your leave of me, and arm yourselves against Zarathustra,
and better still, be ashamed of him. Maybe he hath
deceived you. The Knight of Knowledge must be able not

(27:35):
only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
The man who remaineth a pupil or quiteth his teacher,
but ill and why would ye not pluck at my wreath?
Ye honor me, But what if your reverence should one
day break down? Take heed lest a statue crush you.

(27:58):
Ye say, ye believe in zarahth Ethustra. But of what
account is Zarathustra? Ye are my believers, But of what
account are all believers? Ye had not sought yourselves when
he found me. Thus to all believers, therefore is all

(28:18):
believing worth so little? Now I bid you lose me
and find yourselves. And only when you have all denied
me will I come back unto you. Friedrich Nietzsche. On

(28:42):
this perfect day, when everything is ripening, are not only
the grapes are getting brown? A ray of sunshine has
fallen on my life. I looked behind me, I looked
before me, And never have I seen so many good
things all at once. Not in vain have I buried

(29:02):
my four and fortieth year to day I had the
right to bury it, that in it which still had
life has been saved and is immortal. The First Book
of the Transvaluation of all Values, the Songs of Zarathustra,
the Twilight of the Idols, my attempt to velociize with

(29:25):
the hammer all these things are the gift of this year,
and even of his last quarter. How could I help
being thankful to the whole of my life. That is
why I am now going to tell myself the story
of my life. End of preface