Hitler greeting Elisabeth Nietzsche in Weimar, October 1935 (Ill. 22.3)
But Nietzsche’s Übermenschen had little to do with either airborne aces or fascists. A better indication of their identity came in a passing 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, long time – for example, the Abbé 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 [and] 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 sanctimoniousness, conformity, resentment and prissiness).
Montaigne (1533–92) (Ill. 22.4)
Abbé Galiani (1728–87)
Goethe (1749–1832) (Ill. 22.5)
Stendhal/Henri Beyle (1783–1842) (Ill. 22.6)
They had been involved in the world. Montaigne had been mayor of Bordeaux for two terms and journeyed across Europe on horseback. The Neapolitan Abbé 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 Molière and the intelligence of Plato). Goethe had worked for a decade as a civil servant in the Court in Weimar; he had proposed reforms in agriculture, industry and poor relief, undertaken diplomatic missions and twice had audiences with Napoleon.
(Ill. 22.7)
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.
(Ill. 22.8)
Nietzsche called him ‘magnificent’, ‘the last German I hold in reverence’: ‘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 passionate with my caresses; she was very frightened.’
And finally, these men had all been artists (‘Art is the great stimulant to life,’ recognized Nietzsche), and must have felt extraordinary satisfaction upon completing the Essais, Il Socrate immaginario, Römische Elegien and De l’amour.
8
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 tied together that whoever
wanted
to have as much as possible of one
must
also have as much as possible of the other … you have the choice: either
as little displeasure as possible
, painlessness in brief … or
as much displeasure as possible
as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet? If you decide for the former and desire to diminish and lower the level of human pain, you also have to diminish and lower the level of their
capacity for joy
.
The most fulfilling human projects appeared inseparable from a degree of torment, the sources of our greatest joys lying awkwardly close to those of our greatest pains:
Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the
favourable
conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible.
9
Why? Because no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfilment.
Nietzsche was striving to correct the belief that fulfilment must come easily or not at all, a belief ruinous in its effects, for it leads us to withdraw prematurely from challenges that might have been overcome if only we had been prepared for the savagery legitimately demanded by almost everything valuable.
We might imagine that Montaigne’s Essays had sprung fully formed from his mind and so could take the clumsiness of our own first attempts to write a philosophy of life as signs of a congenital incapacity for the task. We should look instead at the evidence of colossal authorial struggles behind the final masterpiece, the plethora of additions and revisions the Essays demanded.
(Ill. 22.9)
Le Rouge et le noir, Vie de Henry Brulard and De l’amour had been no easier to write. Stendhal had begun his artistic career by sketching out a number of poor plays. One had centred on the landing of an émigré army at Quiberon (the characters were to include William Pitt and Charles James Fox), another had charted Bonaparte’s rise to power and a third – tentatively titled L’Homme qui craint d’être gouverné – had depicted the slide of an old man into senility. Stendhal had spent weeks at the Bibliothèque Nationale, copying out dictionary definitions of words like ‘plaisanterie’, ‘ridicule’ and ‘comique’ – but it had not been enough to transform his leaden play-writing. It was many decades of toil before the masterpieces emerged.