The Outsider

  The convalescence that began with The Joyful Wisdom brought Nietzsche back to that early intuition of the ‘will to power’. When the idea of Eternal Recurrence came to him as he walked by the lake of Silvaplana, he wrote on a slip of paper: ‘Six thousand feet above men and Time.’ This is characteristic. At such moments he felt that he alone of all men had achieved such complete detachment from the circling of days, the wheel of activity. And later, at Rappallo, the idea of Zarathustra ‘waylaid him’ (to use his own phrase). Immediately he was seized up in creative violence; Zarathustra was the nearest he would ever come to being an artist-pure-and-simple. For Nietzsche, the essence of what he detested about Christian sainthood was contained in the words of the medieval churchman who said: ‘We should marvel at nothing in Nature except the redeeming death of Christ.’ But Nietzsche’s saint would be a man who would marvel at everything in Nature, who would live in a continually healthy ecstasy of praise for being alive.*

  * PAGE NOTE: Nietzsche’s most important analysis of asceticism, the third essay of his Genealogy of Morals, attacks it uncompromisingly, but this can be compared with an earlier statement, Nietzsche’s comment on Duhring’s book, The Value of Life. Duhnng asserted: ‘Asceticism is unhealthy, and the sequel of an error.’ Nietzsche answered: ‘No. Asceticism is an instinct that the most noble, the strongest among men have felt. It is a fact; it must be taken into account if the value of life is to be appreciated.’ His own attitude was always consistent with this; he never attacked without carefully weighing the pros and cons.

  In Book One of Also Sprach Zarathustra, the old hermit greets him: ‘Yea, I know thee that thou art Zarathustra. Clear is his eye, nor lurketh any loathing about his mouth. Goeth he not his way like a dancer?’ And this is Zarathustra, the prophet of great health, who began his ‘mission’ like Lawrence’s desert prophets, by leaving the crowds and retiring into solitude for ten years. Like the Biblical prophets, Zarathustra comes down to denounce idolatry. There are two idols that he finds being worshipped: the idealistic systems worshipped by the professors, and the anthropomorphic monster set up by the Church. Blake and Kierkegaard selected the same two points for attack; Blake wrote in ‘Vala’:

  Then man ascended mourning into the splendours of his palace Above him rose a Shadow from his weary intellect.... Man fell prostrate upon his face before the watery shadow Saying: ‘O Lord, whence is this change? Thou knowest I am nothing.5

  At first sight this seems to be mere humanism, as if Blake were saying: Man invented the idea of God. But it isn’t; it is only this particular God that man invented—the bargainer for righteousness, the puppet-maker. And Zarathustra, the prophet of life, the nature mystic, declares: ‘...this I teach to men: No more to bury the head in the sand of heavenly things, but freely to carry it, a head of earth, giving meaning to the earth.’

  This is the beginning of Nietzsche’s positive philosophy. It might, admittedly, be a stepping-off point for almost any kind of materialism, for Marxism or Spencerian rationalism. But Nietzsche’s religious intuitions carried him far beyond any ‘rational materialism’. The idea of Zarathustra began as a reaction against Nietzsche’s own soul-sickness; it was his attempt to give body to the idea of great health. Zarathustra was not a Superman; he was only a man who had succeeded in throwing off the sickness that poisons all other men. Like Hesse, he sees men as sick, corrupt, sinful, and he preaches the need for recognition of man’s sickness if he is to escape from it:

  Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must be an ocean to receive a polluted stream without becoming unclean.

  I teach you the Superman. He is the ocean; in him can your contempt be overwhelmed.

  What is the greatest thing you can experience? It is the hour of great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness is loathesome to you, and your reason and your virtue likewise.

  The hour in which you say: What is my happiness worth? It is poverty and uncleanness and despicable ease. Yet my happiness should justify being itself....

  Not your sin but your sufficiency cries unto heaven, your niggardliness even in sin cries unto heaven... 23

  Our previous experience of Outsiders can have left us in no doubt as to what Zarathustra is talking about. He is describing the Outsider’s experience of collapse of values, self-contempt; and he is telling his audience that they ought all to become Outsiders.

  He condemns the middle way, the bourgeois way, and implies that it is better to be a great sinner than a bourgeois. Zarathustra is a preacher of extremes.

  But what has he to offer, what is the ‘heaven’ of his new religion? The answer, we have already seen, is the Superman:

  Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongues ? Where is the frenzy with which you must be infected ?

  Behold, I teach you the Superman; he is the lightning, he is this frenzy....24

  Again, Nietzsche is obviously thinking in terms of his two ‘vastations’. ‘Lightning and tempest are different worlds, free powers without morality...’ Ture Will, without the troubles

  of intellect ‘He does not think of the Superman as some tall,

  bronzed-skinned god; rather he begins from his own highest vision, and keeps that to the forefront of his mind. He does not want to set up another idol (and the literature of the anaemic life-force worshippers who sprang up as disciples of Nietzsche in the first two decades of our century, proves what a real danger he anticipated). In Ecce Home he states this unambiguously:

  The very last thing I should promise to accomplish would

  be to improve mankind To overthrow idols (idols is the

  name I give to all ideals) is much more like my business. In proportion as an ideal has been falsely worshipped, reality has been robbed of its value, its meaning and its truthfulness.... 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 that the very values have come to be worshipped that are the exact opposite of the one that would assure man’s prosperity, his future and his great right to a future....2*

  This is the essence of Nietzsche’s Existentialism; from it, Existentialism is seen to be the gospel of the will. It does not deny the ideal, provided the ideal comes second and the will first But if their roles get reversed; if the will to more abundant life is made the slave of the ideal (or if it becomes non-existent, as in most professors and professional philosophers), then Nietzsche will have no more of it; he calls for it to be scrapped and thrown into the dustbin, after all the other ideals that have served their purpose.

  But Zarathustra soon learnt that it is no use preaching the Outsider gospel to the people:

  ‘When Zarathustra had thus spoken, one of the people cried: We have heard enough about this tightrope-walker (the Superman); now let us see him. And all the people laughed at Zarathustra...’26

  And Nietzsche goes on to elaborate the parable. Zarathustra has described man as a rope stretched between the Ape and the Superman (here, of course, is the origin of Hesse’s phrase: ‘Man is a bourgeois compromise5). As the people in the marketplace watch, a tightrope-walker comes out of his tower and starts across the rope stretched above the market-place. Suddenly a clown emerges from the tower, runs on to the rope and leaps over the tightrope-walker, who loses his balance and plunges into the market-place. It is Zarathustra who bends over the dying man and quiets his fear of hell by telling him: There is no devil and no hell; your soul will be dead even sooner than your body.’ Then Zarathustra takes up the body and carries it away to inter it.

  It was no accident that Zarathustra had spoken to the people of the Last Man shortly before the tightrope-walker fell to his death.

  Alas, the day comes of the most contemptible man who can no longer condemn himself....

  Then the earth will have grown small, and upon it shall hop the Last Man who makes all things small; his kind is inexterminable, like the ground flea. The last man lives longest.27

  The clown had hopped—like a flea—
over the tightrope-walker. The Outsider is destroyed by human pettiness, human triviality and stupidity. It is Van Gogh and Nijinsky over again. And Zarathustra muses:

  Man’s life is a strange matter and full of unreason; a buffoon may be fatal to it.

  Nietzsche, too, would fall off the tightrope. It would happen only seven years after he had written Zarathustra. Close reading of Zarathustra will give us a very clear insight into the causes of the breakdown. For Nietzsche had known what it meant to stand completely alone; to feel that he was the only healthy man in a sick universe, to feel that he had been destined by some force greater than himself to stand as a witness and, if necessary, to die completely alone. There is a passage in Rilke, in Malte Laurids Brigge, that catches the essence of the Nietzschean Outsider; it is a passage that should not be omitted from any study of the Outsider. Alone in his room, in a foreign city, the young poet asks himself:

  It is possible that nothing important or real has yet been seen or known or said? Is it possible that mankind has had thousands of years in which to observe, reflect, record, and allowed these millennia to slip by like the recess interval at school in which one eats a sandwich and an apple ?

  Yes, it is possible.

  Is it possible that, despite our discoveries and progress…we still remain on the surface of life?

  Yes, it is possible.

  Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood?...

  Yes, it is possible.

  Is it possible that these people know with perfect accuracy a past that has never existed? Is it possible that all the realities are nothing to them, that their life runs on, unconnected with anything, like a watch in an empty room?

  Yes, it is possible....

  But if all this is possible—if it has even no more than a semblance of possibility—then surely... something must be done. The first-comer... must begin to do some of the neglected things... there is no one else at hand.28

  And Zarathustra expresses Nietzsche’s own experience of these Outsider thoughts in ‘The Way of the Creator’:

  ‘He who seeks may go astray. All solitude is sin/ says the herd. And long were you yourself of the herd.

  The voice of the herd still lingers in you, and when you shall say: ‘I no longer have a common conscience with them’, it shall be a grief and pain to you.

  You call yourself free? I would hear of your master-thought, not of your escape from the yoke.

  Are you a man that should escape from the yoke? Many have cast off all their values when they cast off their servitude.

  Free from what? How does that concern Zarathustra? Let your eye answer me frankly: Free for what?29 ... a day will come when loneliness shall weary you, when your pride shall writhe and your courage gnash its teeth. In that day you shall cry: I am alone.

  A day will come when you shall see your high things no more, and your low things all too near; you shall fear your exaltation as if it were a phantom. In that day you will cry: All is false.

  There are emotions that seek to slay the solitary; if they don’t succeed they must perish themselves. Are you able to be a murderer?30

  Only a year before he had written this, Nietzsche had written in his Sanctus Januarius: ‘I wish to be at all times hereafter only a Yea-sayer.’ In Zarathustra we learn something of the difficulties encountered by a man who is determined only to praise:

  Thus in a good hour once spake my purity: ‘All beings shall be divine for me.’

  Then you came with filthy phantoms. Alas, whither fled the good hour?

  Once I vowed to renounce all disgust. Then you changed those nearest to me into ulcers.... What happened then to my noblest vow?81

  Nietzsche himself, we can say without unfairness, lacked the elements of a Superman; or at all events, let us say, he lacked the initial power of self-discipline to overcome these emotions aroused by human stupidity. So, of course, did Van Gogh and Lawrence and Nijinsky, and the heroes of Sartre and Barbusse and Camus. Hemingway’s heroes escaped the stupidity by going in for high excitement: big game hunting and bullfighting and war. That solved no problems. It all comes back (to borrow a phrase from Shaw) to the ‘appetite for fruitful activity and a high quality of life’. It is the problem of our second chapter, the World without Values. For the Outsider, the world into which he has been born is always a world without values. Compared to his own appetite for a purpose and a direction, the way most men live is not living at all; it is drifting. This is the Outsider’s wretchedness, for all men have a herd instinct that leads them to believe that what the majority does must be right. Unless he can evolve a set of values that will correspond to his own higher intensity of purpose, he may as well throw himself under a bus, for he will always be an outcast and a misfit.

  But once this purpose is found, the difficulties are half over. Let the Outsider accept without further hesitation: I am different from other men because I have been destined to something greater; let him see himself in the role of predestined poet, predestined prophet or world-betterer, and a half of the Outsider’s problems have been solved. What he is saying is, in effect, this: In most men, the instinct of brotherhood with other men is stronger—the herd instinct; in me, a sense of brotherhood with something other than man is strongest, and demands priority. When the Outsider comes to look at other men closely and sympathetically, the hard and fast distinctions break down; he cannot say: I am a poet and they are not, for he soon comes to recognize that no one is entirely a business-man, just as no poet is entirely a poet. He can only say: the sense of purpose that makes me a poet is stronger than theirs. His needle swings to magnetic pole without hesitation; theirs wavers around all the points of the compass and only points north when they come particularly close to the pole, when under the influence of drink or patriotism or sentimentality. I speak of these last three conditions without disparagement; all forms of stimulation of man’s sense of purpose are equally valid and, if applied for long enough, would have the effect of making a man into an Outsider. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise’, Blake wrote.

  All of these conclusions become obvious after a study of Nietzsche. For Nietzsche has taken certain steps which throw more light on the Outsider’s obscure way to salvation. To begin with, Nietzsche reached our conclusions of Chapter IV: intellectual discipline is not enough. Zarathustra is primarily an intellectual, like his creator. He is also a poet and nature mystic, like Van Gogh. He is also a lover of the physical, like Nijinsky: he never ceases to liken himself to a dancer and to speak of dancing as the most vital form of self-expression. In him we can find the same reaction against thin-blooded intellectualism as in Blake or Walt Whitman. Zarathustra also ‘sings the body electric’. ‘Body I am throughout and nothing but body, and soul is only a word for something in the body’; Blake had written: ‘Man has no body distinct from his soul, for that called body is a portion of the soul discerned by the five senses.5 The two statements sound contradictory, but they are both a response to the same perception, that body itself is vital and good.

  But Nietzsche considered that his perception clashed with the Christian idea, that the body is the ‘frail and unimportant tenement of the soul5. The doctrine of introversion that underlay most ascetic Christianity in the Middle Ages (and still governs a great deal of monastic life) holds that Man originally was completely free; the Fall made him a slave of outward things; his salvation, therefore, lies in turning the attention inward, away from outside things. Blake, who was always more interested in Christ than in historic Christianity, found no body-contempt in Christ and could therefore declare himself a Christian without misgivings; Nietzsche was always more aware of Luther than Christ; Luther undoubtedly was a contemner of the body; Nietzsche called vhimself an Anti-Christ when he more probably meant an Anti-Luther. Nietzsche’s temperament was less devotional, more intellectual, than Blake’s; there is a fundamental similarity all the same, and it would be more accurate to regard Nietzsche as a Blakeian Christian than as
an irreligious pagan. Always provided, of course, we know what we mean by a Blakeian Christian (unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of this book to study Blake’s conception of Christianity).

  Nietzsche understood the Outsider far better than anyone we have spoken of so far. Lawrence and Van Gogh were men working in the dark; Nietzsche wasn’t.