Greg Detre
Saturday, 20 January, 2001
Heller succeeds in a portrait of Nietzsche, a man rent apart by a terrible prophetic, apocalyptic understanding. In an extraordinarily beautiful, readable and comprehending essay, he considers Nietzsche�s thought in the context of Nietzsche�
In last week's tutorial, we talked
about what Nietzsche might have had to say about his own writings, whether he
would have affirmed them, rejoiced in them and celebrated whichever great man
had penned them, or whether he would have tossed them aside in disgust,
understanding immediately the torture of a soul who felt the need to invert and
assert the depravity of everything which provided consolation.
Dear Dr
Rosen,
I just read Erich Heller's essay, The Importance of Nietzsche, on the recommendation of a friend, and it seemed to investigate that very question. It portrays Nietzsche as a man rent apart by a terrible prophetic, apocalyptic understanding born of a continual suffering which he is so determined to lament, he yearns to exult in. In response, he masochistically traps himself by reifying his own secret fear, the Eternal Recurrence, and creates an ideal for himself in its opposite, the Ubermensch, the one who is tempered and noble in the face of the ensuing bitterness and despair, he who is furthest from Nietzsche's own weakness.
In this way, Nietzsche is the herald, the John the Baptist (though Heller puts it in terms of St Thomas Aquinas to Dante) of his own particular morality, and he is urging the future philosophers to be the same in relation to theirs - to create the value system which best suits, probes, drowns and spurs one's own spirit. Your view that his ambivalence towards the will to truth, sometimes happily indulging in it and at other times inveighing against it, is indicative of an understanding that future philosophers will likely deny and eventually even cease to feel its promptings seems to make sense here, I think. But now I get confused when thinking about Nietzsche and truth in the way that any system which uses its own mechanism upon itself runs out of room.
Anyway, I really enjoyed Heller's essay. I'm a small part of the way through the Birth of Tragedy. It's tempting while reading it to coin the term, 'The Will to Art' (TM), as vying with truth for Nietzsche's preferential metaphysic :)