14
The philosopher had a practical as well as a metaphorical interest in horticulture. On resigning from Basle University in 1879, Nietzsche had set his heart on becoming a professional gardener. ‘You know that my preference is for a simple, natural way of life,’ he informed his surprised mother, ‘and I am becoming increasingly eager for it. There is no other cure for my health. I need real work, which takes time and induces tiredness without mental strain.’ He remembered an old tower in Naumburg near his mother’s house, which he planned to rent while looking after the adjoining garden. The gardening life began with enthusiasm in September 1879 – but there were soon problems. Nietzsche’s poor eyesight prevented him from seeing what he was trimming, he had difficulty bending his back, there were too many leaves (it was autumn) and after three weeks, he felt he had no alternative but to give up.
Yet traces of his horticultural enthusiasm survived in his philosophy, for in certain passages, he proposed that we should look at our difficulties like gardeners. At their roots, plants can be odd and unpleasant, but a person with knowledge and faith in their potential will lead them to bear beautiful flowers and fruit – just as, in life, at root level, there may be difficult emotions and situations which can nevertheless result, through careful cultivation, in the greatest achievements and joys.
One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis.
(Ill. 22.19)
But most of us fail to recognize the debt we owe to these shoots of difficulty. We are liable to think that anxiety and envy have nothing legitimate to teach us and so remove them like emotional weeds. We believe, as Nietzsche put it, that ‘the higher is not allowed to grow out of the lower, is not allowed to have grown at all … everything first-rate must be causa sui [the cause of itself].’
Yet ‘good and honoured things’ were, Nietzsche stressed, ‘artfully related, knotted and crocheted to … wicked, apparently antithetical things’. ‘Love and hate, gratitude and revenge, good nature and anger … belong together,’ which does not mean that they have to be expressed together, but that a positive may be the result of a negative successfully gardened. Therefore:
The emotions of hatred, envy, covetousness and lust for domination [are] life-conditioning emotions … which must fundamentally and essentially be present in the total economy of life.
To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant.
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
15
It was for their apparent appreciation of the point that Nietzsche looked back in admiration to the ancient Greeks.
It is tempting when contemplating their serene temples at dusk, like those at Paestum, a few kilometres from Sorrento – which Nietzsche visited with Malwida von Meysenbug in early 1877 – to imagine that the Greeks were an unusually measured people whose temples were the outward manifestations of an order they felt within themselves and their society.
This had been the opinion of the great classicist Johann Winckelmann (1717–68) and had won over successive generations of German university professors. But Nietzsche proposed that far from arising out of serenity, classical Greek civilization had arisen from the sublimation of the most sinister forces:
The greater and more terrible the passions are that an age, a people, an individual can permit themselves, because they are capable of employing them as
a means
,
the higher stands their culture
.
The temples might have looked calm, but they were the flowers of well-gardened plants with dark roots. The Dionysiac festivals showed both the darkness and the attempt to control and cultivate it:
Nothing astonishes the observer of the Greek world more than when he discovers that from time to time the Greeks made as it were a festival of all their passions and evil natural inclinations and even instituted a kind of official order of proceedings in the celebration of what was all-too-human in them … They took this all-too-human to be inescapable and, instead of reviling it, preferred to accord it a kind of right of the second rank through regulating it within the usages of society and religion: indeed, everything in man possessing
power
they called divine and inscribed it on the walls of their Heaven. They do not repudiate the natural drive that finds expression in the evil qualities but regulate it and, as soon as they have discovered sufficient prescriptive measures to provide these wild waters with the least harmful means of channeling and outflow, confine them to definite cults and days. This is the root of all the moral free-mindedness of antiquity. One granted to the evil and suspicious … a moderate discharge, and did not strive after their total annihilation.
The Greeks did not cut out their adversities; they cultivated them:
All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, in which they draw their victims down by weight of stupidity – and a later, very much later one in which they marry the spirit, ‘spiritualize’ themselves. In former times, because of the stupidity of passion, people waged war on passion itself: they plotted to destroy it …
Destroying
the passions and desires merely in order to avoid their stupidity and the disagreeable consequences of their stupidity seems to us nowadays to be itself simply an acute form of stupidity. We no longer marvel at dentists who
pull out
teeth to stop them hurting.
(Ill. 22.20)
Fulfilment is reached by responding wisely to difficulties that could tear one apart. Squeamish spirits may be tempted to pull the molar out at once or come off Piz Corvatsch on the lower slopes. Nietzsche urged us to endure.
16
And far from coincidentally, never to drink.
Dear Mother
,
If I write to you today, it is about one of the most unpleasant and painful incidents I have ever been responsible for. In fact, I have misbehaved very badly, and I don’t know whether you can or will forgive me. I pick up my pen most reluctantly and with a heavy heart, especially when I think back to our pleasant life together during the Easter holidays, which was never spoiled by any discord. Last Sunday, I got drunk, and I have no excuse, except that I did not know how much I could take, and I was rather excited in the afternoon
.
So wrote eighteen-year-old Friedrich to his mother Franziska after four glasses of beer in the halls of Attenburg near his school in the spring of 1863. A few years later, at Bonn and Leipzig universities, he felt irritation with his fellow students for their love of alcohoclass="underline" ‘I often found the expressions of good fellowship in the clubhouse extremely distasteful … I could hardly bear certain individuals because of their beery materialism.’
Nietzsche’s student fraternity at Bonn University.
Nietzsche is in the second row, leaning to one side.
Note, in the row below, the fraternity beerkeg. (Ill. 22.21)
The attitude remained constant throughout the philosopher’s adult life: