Friedrich Nietzsche
Monday, December 21st, 2009
I’ve been intrigued by Nietzsche ever since one of my lecturers at college stormed out of a seminar about him, fuming he was not going to listen to ‘any more of that rubbish’. Anyone capable of arousing such strong emotions has to be of interest!
On reading his work – or some of it, anyway – I encounter a strange mixture of poetry, profound insight and man-in-pub-who’s-had-one-too-many generalizations. What I never do is get bored, which is a danger with reading more conventional Anglo-American ‘analytic’ philosophy (or incomprehensible French post-everything-ism).
To get the bad stuff out of the way first, Nietzsche’s views on women seem to me unworthy of a man of his intellect and sensitivity. Perhaps he didn’t have enough experience: in his day, the sexes were much more segregated than they are now, and the women he did know were rather rum – his great love Lou Andreas Salome sounds a bit of a tease, and his sister was a raving anti-Semite. But still…
Similarly, his view of the mass of humanity is too bleak. Are huge swathes of our fellow human beings ‘superfluous’? I’ll say more about his later.
When he stops harrumphing about women, the plebs etc., Nietzsche has glorious things to say about the life-force and its divinity. He had little time for religion, but would have made a great pagan, as he was filled with love of life. ‘I should only believe in a God that knew how to dance,’ he wrote. His ‘superman’ was above all someone who felt, celebrated and lived by the joyfulness of life, unimpeded by the self-pity inculcated by certain styles of religion.
He is particularly scathing about what we now call passive-aggressive people who hide behind protestations of virtue when they are actually trying to score points off others (usually off people who know how to have fun better than they do). His dislike of ‘equality’ stems from this, as passive-aggressives are often levellers-down.
Nietzsche understood that the path to wisdom is a rocky one, and that people on that path often make themselves look stupid in the eyes of the purely practical (or attract envy from the timorous). It is from this understanding that his dislike of the majority springs: the majority will often damn or at least belittle a spirit seeking authenticity. Is he right about this? I rather accept that the mass of people as a mass are a bit dim, but as individual human beings most of us find quiet, private ways of expressing our beauty and wisdom – away from the prying eyes of philosophers! Also, the act of disdaining others is itself damaging. It may be a necessary, temporary defence for the original but unconfident individual, but it is not in the long term sustaining and life-enriching. Better to look for the good in people, while at the same time being aware of their faults. Nietzsche did not seem to understand this.
But still, his understanding of the search for meaning, of its difficulty and its centrality to the well-lived passionate life, puts him way ahead of most philosophers, who seem to be rather schoolmasterly observers of life rather than bloodied but unbowed participants in it. ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger’ he once wrote. I can overlook even his arrogance and misogyny because of that.
The journey to genuine selfhood is something I’ve found pretty difficult – not to selfishness (that’s easy), but to understanding who I really am, what I really believe and what I have to do to make my life worthwhile. I get embarrassed too easily, and behind that lurks a deeper fear of nihilism – both of these make the honesty (with self and others) and mistake-making necessary to real personal development hard. I hope I have done honour to these things in the character of Stella.
On a wider front, our pluralist, competitive, individualistic, emotional, self-improving culture seems to owe a lot to Friedrich Nietzsche, or at least to have developed in ways he foresaw. My lecturer should have stuck around…
This entry was posted
on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Blog.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Starter for Ten
Saturday, December 12th, 2009
‘Starter for Ten’ by David Nicholls is an excellent piece of comic fiction in the gentle rather than the dark tradition. There are lots of wonderful comic scenes, metaphors, asides, contrasts (etc.) – the bit where the nerdy Patrick has his ‘team’ all playing with home-made buzzers had me laughing out loud on the train home: a marvellous concatenation of comic events… It is also good-hearted, which gentle comedy has to be. A bit implausible in places? Maybe: the narrator’s mate Spencer seems a little to quick to forgive some pretty base disloyalty. But forgiveness lies at the heart of gentle comedy, so it’s a fault in the right direction. Do go and read it.
It got me thinking about comedy again, and what its message is and how important that message is. I guess one way of looking at gentle comedy is to say that it is about how people (or some people) learn; about what price in embarrassment, dismantling of unrealistic dreams (etc.) they have to pay for experience and wisdom – for learning how the world works, what’s fair and unfair, what you can expect from life and what you can’t, what you can expect from other people and what you can’t, and generally the necessity of big basic values like kindness, consideration for others, honesty, courage, pride, effort, forgiveness, optimism and, of course, love.
They do this learning by bumping into the brick wall of life: other people and their wants, needs, expectations etc. They need a certain feistiness to do this – or at least to do this with a big enough bump to be dramatic and funny. In my own novel, Stella is rather a quiet person. Is she too quiet to be a true comic heroine? I’m not sure. But she is who she is, and I love her (in the way authors love their favourite characters!) and feel a powerful need to tell her story. Maybe this means another Chris West unpublishable novel – time will tell. In the end, she learns, which is the destiny of the true comic hero or heroine; she learns a better balance between her own needs and those of others (and an improved capacity to merge the two) and to be more forgiving and less silently furious (and to stop taking her rage out on herself). Another character (I’m not going to give it all away, in case the book does get published, by me or someone else) doesn’t learn, and suffers. A third character doesn’t learn, but lands on his feet anyway – ainsi donc la vie.
I contrast gentle comedy (which essentially believes that the world has some good lessons to teach us) with raging comedy, which rages at some unjust aspect of the world – this is what Robert McKee looks for in comedy. Maybe there is also existential comedy, which doesn’t even accept the notion of ‘injustice’: the world is just random and mad, and that’s all there is to it.
To me, gentle comedy is actually the deepest of these, as it relates to the real journey of life, which I see as a struggle to make one’s true self positive, life-affirming and loving. It’s a hard struggle, as human beings are full of contradictory passions and the world can be random and mad. It’s also one where the price of failure is high. So I don’t see work that reflects this struggle as trite. Nor is such work unrealistic: the struggle can be, and is, won, all the time, by lots of people. Optimistic work can be trite of course – that’s the skill of the great gentle comic, to avoid that trap, and show how bloody hard the struggle can be, without making it seem impossible or pointless (or not funny any longer). Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale has always struck me as a good model for this. There’s some pretty dark stuff in there, but good triumphs in the end.
A lot of so-called ‘serious’ literature seems to rather cop out from this – it often seems to focus on people who lose the struggle and end up alienated. This can be interesting if the struggle was noble and close, but not nearly as interesting as stories of people where the struggle is successful. And there’ll be a lot fewer laughs.
This entry was posted
on Saturday, December 12th, 2009 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Blog.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
The Spirit of Comedy
Sunday, December 6th, 2009
The spirit of comedy looks at the world and rejoices in its variety and unpredictability. It links us together in laughter at our condition, for we are all subject to this, it tells us. It rejoices in the energy and multifariousness and the perpetual blossoming of life. It looks at the enemies of life – selfishness, egotism, cruelty, self-pity, cynicism – and rather than shy away, pokes fun at them, and takes away their power by making them look ridiculous. Comedy makes love triumph in the end; it places solid ground under the kind, the thoughtful, the fair-minded, the cheerful, the considerate; it puts a smile on the faces of people who live by these things, and whispers to them that they are the wise ones, after all. In a world where the negative qualities I mentioned earlier often appear to bring the biggest rewards, this is a powerful message.
I hear the objection: the world isn’t just ‘a bit nasty’; it is a place where truly terrible things happen. Isn’t comedy somehow trivial in the face of these – the 9 / 11 atrocity, the continuing poverty of a billion people, the threat of global catastrophe? But these things are only atrocious because they are an insult to something higher, and that something is the dignity and value of the human beings who will suffer from it. And that dignity and value is celebrated by comedy.
It’s no accident that people faced with dire circumstances often use comedy to protect themselves, to reassert their humanity.
Behind the spirit of comedy lies the message of forgiveness. ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’ In comedy, the stupidest deeds can be forgiven if the perpetrator turns round, admits their folly, realizes there is a better way to live and follows that path.
The objection again – every deed? Even the worst crimes like murder or sustained cruelty? I’m not sure. I believe that people who do these things have layers of pomposity around them – after all, what gives them the right to inflict misery on others, other than their sense of overweening self-importance? (Often this is a reaction to an even more overweening sense of self-hatred, but that is also a false overreaction to life and themselves and ‘what it means to be human’.) Maybe comedy can’t directly look at atrocities, but it can certainly undermine the arrogance of the people who commit them, and reassert the value of the victims (not as ‘victims’, the tabloid way, but as people). And maybe, just maybe, it can look at atrocities directly – it would be a brave comic writer who set a piece of work in a concentration camp or a building about to be destroyed by terrorists, but if someone had been through such an ordeal and said they had found humour both present and a consolation at that time, I would have undying respect for such a person.
The comedy I like best is gentle, ironic, fun-poking. But I accept there is another kind: raging, darker, more existential. In modern stand-up, do you like Michael McIntyre or Frankie Boyle? (Actually, I like both.) I do not accept that the former, gentler comedy is somehow less authentic than the latter, darker stuff. Gentleness is a virtue, not a vice. The gentle comic knows full well there is darkness out there (and in here), but believes that a powerful defence against this darkness is life lived according to civilized values (kindness, and so on; the virtues I mentioned in my first paragraph). He or she is a bit like the New York mayor, who by cleaning up graffiti, litter etc. actually cut the murder rate in the city.
Having said that, in The Enlightenment Club, I have tried to write a fundamentally gentle, kind-hearted comedy, but with a sense of edge to it, an awareness that there is a terrible darkness that souls can plummet into. Maybe the experiment won’t work, but it seems worth trying. The spirit of comedy – which, as I write this piece, has turned in my mind from an ‘it’ to a mighty deity, worthy of a place on Olympus – seemed to ask me to do it, and I am his loyal follower.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Blog.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
There is a force…
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
There is a force, the existence of which I was in complete ignorance as a child or a young man, for good in myself (or at least ‘into which I can connect’).
To say this is not to criticize my parents for not making me aware of it: I think it is something one can only understand as an adult. It is the force that comes from being a whole person, in command of oneself, responsible for one’s actions, and from using this power in the way it is meant to be used.
It is a very ‘social’ force. It has learnt that on our own, we can achieve very little. It is very humble in some ways, and incredibly mighty in others. It is not the force of the aggressive (and secretly scared) young man who thinks life is a struggle of all against all. It brings itself into play in close relationships where those pointless power games have been seen through and transcended – it puts itself at the disposal of the ‘owner’, but also of anyone with whom he or she co-operates from the heart. (I say ‘from the heart’, because co-operation that becomes tainted with power games is no outlet for this force, which in such cases turns away in sadness at what might have been.)
I’m not sure if it can live without others: maybe it just fritters away in solitude. I certainly think it craves company, like a child wanting playmates (which is nature telling that child that his or her future is out there in the world, interacting with others). Yet it is not ‘needy’ in the sense that a lovelorn teenager is needy, desperate for confirmation of their worth via the affection of another. It knows its value, and can wait for worthy partners. But it cannot wait forever – there is too much to be done out there!
It is ‘individualism’ – once individualism moves on from egotism and telling the world to eff off, and becomes a great shout of triumph at what we human individuals can do, make and become. It expresses itself in openness and trust, in kindness and love, in affection, in the joy of working towards shared goals. Its enemies are deceit, manipulation, point-scoring; deeper and darker, its enemies are cruelty, selfishness, the agonized machinations of the narcissistic ego.
It does not desire fame: it seeks close relationships with a few fellow human beings, not the brief attention of the masses. If fame points its searchlight at it, it behaves with dignity – but it is essentially private and personal. (It is dismissive of great public schemes of virtue, knowing that virtue lies in how you treat other individual human beings, not in the generalities and ‘politics’ you spout: it looks at the great ideologies of the last century and shakes its head in sadness at the havoc these caused; it looks at the religious fundamentalism of the current era and – just for a moment – wonders if mankind will ever see sense.)
It does not desire wealth, but it does not despise wealth either. It knows wealth is often the result of hard work in the service of others, but even when wealth is not a result of this, it does not seek to get on its high horse and judge. (It’s not really into judging others, anyway – leave that for the point-scorers. ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged…’) Wealth is, in truth, indifferent to it. OK, maybe it is a little dismissive of people who can’t pay their way in life (unless they are truly afflicted), but beyond that… It knows that real wealth is who you are – the values you actually live by and the people you love and work with – not your bank balance, car, address etc..
In case this all sounds appallingly goody-goody, it is not the Christian notion of ‘selfless service of others’. It is very self-ful, not the narcissistic ego ‘look at me!’ self, but something infinitely wiser and deeper, but still clearly a self: this is about me. And you, and your self too, of course. It does not ‘serve’ others but works alongside them, helping them become and give of their best. And these ‘others’ are carefully chosen. This power can be ruthless if it feels it is being messed about by people who are not ready to work with it: its energies are too subtle and too precious to waste. (It does not despise such ‘unready’ people, but has to protect itself from them.) The true Christian, wading out into that great sea of neediness in prisons and addiction treatment centres and handing out love left right and centre, is an object of slightly puzzled admiration: ‘But don’t they suck you dry?’
At this moment in my life, to live by this force remains a part-truth and a continuing aspiration rather than the whole truth of who I am. There’s still a lot of pain and vanity and fury and egotism and other negative stuff inside. But I’m working towards the whole truth. I am lucky to have some wonderful people around who will help me get there. (I say this, but I do not believe they are that rare – I have a hunch that the world is actually full of good, strong, loving people: these ones just happen to be the ones close to me.) And I will help them get where they want to be, too: that’s the point of all this.
I feel hugely lucky to have come to know this force, not just intellectually but in my heart (not lucky in the sense of luckier than others, but luckier than the person I once thought I was; lucky to be this wonderful thing called a human being, with all this energy, creativity and capacity for love and affection). I am pained when I see how often I fall short of it. I am determined to fight on and grow towards its bright and life-enhancing light.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 8:42 am and is filed under Blog.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Solid Joys and Lasting Treasure
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
Happiness can well up in us at any time. Which is lovely, but the real prize is to be able to hold on to it, to quietly place it at the heart of our motivation, values and world-picture, not in a needy grasping way but one that is both solid and relaxed.
Otherwise, it can just leach away, or, worse, lead to a kind of ‘equal and opposite’ reaction – a point that was first made by Jacques Lacan (a writer whose work I normally find incomprehensible, but who certainly hit something here.) If your mind has been programmed for not much pleasure, for example by a puritan upbringing, too much of the stuff can just short-circuit the system with painful results (Lacan called this ‘jouissance’). How much pleasure can you take?
But maybe it’s not just about amount of pleasure, but about quality. I think some kinds of pleasure are inherently more lasting and stable than others.
For the Christian, the most lasting and stable pleasure is that of knowing God’s love – the quote after which I have entitled this piece comes from an eighteenth century hymn by John Newton (which I remember singing in school). As a ‘possibilist’ I can certainly accept that as one potential source of solid joy, but I would like to look at others, just in case Nietzsche was right after all!
Looking at the writings of the British psychoanalytic school, there is a clear and powerful belief in love as a solid joy and lasting treasure. Fairburn postulated that our need for love was our deepest motive, and Bowlby showed what happened when it was not given to the growing child. (So The Beatles were right!) I certainly think that a loving family is a marvellous source of love, and a wonderful safe place where love gets cycled round and round (despite the odd argument, falling-out etc.) Family life got a lot of stick from so-called progressive people when I was growing up, and looking back I’m afraid they were talking total crap. To truly love another human being is the most ennobling – and wisdom-granting – experience we can have.
Another deep source of joy is our simple capacity for fun – a deceptively deep connection to those sources. Fun is a sudden letting rip of energy and joie-de-vivre with no agenda or egoism. Yippee! I stress the ‘no agenda or egoism’ bit.
Neither of these two joy sources get a lot of mention in so-called serious philosophy, but I think this is a big mistake.
It’s also interesting to look at the enemies of joyfulness. I’m afraid that public life seems full of these – by which I don’t just mean ‘work’, but politics and the more general placing of ourselves in a social context. Envy and concern about status can ‘get to us’ and kill joy, even well away from work. Work itself, of course, can necessitate dealing with fucked-up, energy-sucking people (as well as delightful, fun, life-enhancing people – a third source of joy!) Work is important, financially and spiritually – it’s more than Philip Larkin’s ‘old toad’ – but putting it right at the heart of our lives seems just plain wrong to me.
As a young man, I thought a lot about politics, what was fair, unfair in society etc. As I grow older, I worry less and less about this. Human flourishing is not about success or social position, but about developing one’s ability to tap into solid, lasting sources of joy, the placing of this ability at the heart of our being, and the capacity to then spread this joy out to (at least a few) others. Too elevated a social position (or too strong a concern with elevating one’s social position) can force false idols into the rightful place of a true, living faith in humanity – one’s own, and other people’s – and (possibly) in God. That doesn’t mean that vicious inequality and exploitation are ‘OK’, but it does mean that removing these won’t of itself solve humanity’s problems. We all have to learn how to live happily and on good, honourable terms with our fellow human beings, and this truth will never change, whatever form society takes.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Blog.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.