Nietzsche

It would be wonderful if personal development came easily and sweetly – and maybe for some lucky people it does. But often, the path of development – the path to becoming the kind of person you want to be – is rather tortuous and daunting.

Nietzsche tells the story of his own development as a kind of fable. And the lesson is about courage in the face of difficulty. It is normal, he says, to have difficulty growing up. Crucially, freedom involves separation: you have to leave cherished things behind, and leaving them is so hard that you might have to turn against them, for a while – which looks callous and mean, but isn’t really.

For parents, this is a hard but ultimately consoling lesson. Your children may go through a period of rejecting you and everything you care for. This is not because they hate you, but because they love you; and to get free – to become independent – they need to break away. For a loving person to break those bonds is so hard that for a while they have to become almost violent and cruel. Nietzsche can’t make this easy but he can make it slightly less heartbreaking.

It may be conjectured that the decisive event for a spirit in whom the type of the ‘free spirit’ is one day to ripen to sweet perfection has been a great separation, and that before it, he was probably all the more a bound spirit, and seemed to be chained forever to his corner, to his post. What binds most firmly? Which cords can almost not be torn? With men of a high and select type, it will be their obligations: that awe which befits the young, their diffidence and delicacy before all that is time-honoured and dignified, their gratitude for the ground out of which they grew, for the hand that led them, for the shrine where they learned to worship – their own highest moments will bind them most firmly and oblige them most lastingly. For such bound people the great separation comes suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: all at once the young soul is devastated, torn loose, torn out – it does not know what is happening. An urge, a pressure governs it, mastering the soul like a command: the will and wish awaken to go away, anywhere, at any cost: a violent, dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames up and flickers in all the senses. ‘Better to die than live here,’ so sounds the imperious and seductive voice. And this ‘here’, this ‘at home’ is everything which it had loved until then! A sudden horror and suspicion of that which it loved; a lightning flash of contempt towards that which was its ‘obligation’; a rebellious, despotic, volcanically jolting desire to roam abroad, to become alienated, cool, sober, icy: a hatred of love, perhaps a desecratory reaching and glancing backward, to where it had until then worshipped and loved; perhaps a blush of shame at its most recent act, and at the same time, jubilation that it was done; a drunken, inner, jubilant shudder, which betrays a victory – a victory? over what? over whom? …

Such bad and painful things are part of the history of the great separation. It is also a disease that can destroy man, this first outburst of strength and will to self-determination, self-valorization, this will to free will: and how much disease is expressed by the wild attempts and peculiarities with which the freed man, the separated man, now tries to prove his rule over things! He wanders about savagely with an unsatisfied lust; his booty must atone for the dangerous tension of his pride; he rips apart what attracts him. With an evil laugh he overturns what he finds concealed, spared until then by some shame; he investigates how these things look if they are overturned. There is some arbitrariness and pleasure in arbitrariness to it, if he then perhaps directs his favour to that which previously stood in disrepute – if he creeps curiously and enticingly around what is most forbidden. Behind his ranging activity (for he is journeying restlessly and aimlessly, as in a desert) stands the question mark of an ever more dangerous curiosity. ‘Cannot all values be overturned? And is Good perhaps Evil? And God only an invention, a nicety of the devil? Is everything perhaps ultimately false? And if we are deceived, are we not for that very reason also deceivers? Must we not be deceivers, too?’ Such thoughts lead and mislead him, always further onward, always further away. Loneliness surrounds him, curls round him, ever more threatening, strangling, heart-constricting, that fearful goddess and … but who today knows what loneliness is?

It is still a long way from this morbid isolation, from the desert of these experimental years, to that enormous, overflowing certainty and health which cannot do without even illness itself, as an instrument and fish-hook of knowledge; to that mature freedom of the spirit which is self-mastery and discipline of the heart, and which permits paths to many opposing ways of thought. It is a long way to the inner spaciousness and cosseting of a superabundance which precludes the danger that the spirit might lose itself on its own paths and fall in love and stay put, intoxicated, in some nook; a long way to that excess of vivid healing, reproducing, reviving powers, the very sign of great health, an excess that gives the free spirit the dangerous privilege of being permitted to live experimentally and to offer himself to adventure: the privilege of the master free spirit! In between may lie long years of convalescence, years full of multicoloured, painful magical transformations, governed and led by a tough will to health which already often dares to dress and disguise itself as health. There is a middle point on the way, which a man having such a fate cannot remember later without being moved: a pale, fine light and sunny happiness are characteristic of it, a feeling of a birdlike freedom, birdlike perspective, birdlike arrogance, some third thing in which curiosity and a tender contempt are united. A ‘free spirit’ – this cool term is soothing in that state, almost warming. No longer chained down by hatred and love, one lives without Yes, without No, voluntarily near, voluntarily far, most preferably slipping away, avoiding, fluttering on, gone again, flying upward again; one is spoiled, like anyone who has ever seen an enormous multiplicity beneath him – and one becomes the antithesis of those who trouble themselves about things that do not concern them. Indeed, now the free spirit concerns himself only with things (and how many there are!) which no longer trouble him.

Another step onward in convalescence. The free spirit again approaches life, slowly, of course, almost recalcitrantly, almost suspiciously. It grows warmer around him again, yellower, as it were; feeling and fellow feeling gain depth; mild breezes of all kinds pass over him. He almost feels as if his eyes were only now open to what is near. He is amazed and sits motionless: Where had he been, then? These near and nearest things, how they seem to him transformed! What magical fluff they have acquired in the meantime! He glances backward gratefully – grateful to his travels, to his severity and self-alienation, to his far-off glances and bird flights into cold heights. How good that he did not stay ‘at home’, ‘with himself’ the whole time, like a dull, pampered loafer! He was beside himself: there is no doubt about that. Only now does he see himself – and what surprises he finds there! What untried terrors! What happiness even in weariness, in the old illness, in the convalescent’s relapses! How he likes to sit still, suffering, spinning patience, or to lie in the sun! Who understands as he does the happiness of winter, the sun spots on the wall! They are the most grateful animals in the world, the most modest, too, these convalescents and squirrels, turned halfway back to life again – there are those among them who let no day pass without hanging a little song of praise on its trailing hem. And to speak seriously, all pessimism (the inveterate evil of old idealists and liars, as we know) is thoroughly cured by falling ill in the way these free spirits do, staying ill for a good while, and then, for even longer, even longer, becoming healthy – I mean ‘healthier’. There is wisdom, practical wisdom in it, when over a long period of time even health itself is administered only in small doses.

About that time it may finally happen, among the sudden illuminations of a still turbulent, still changeable state of health, that the free spirit, ever freer, begins to unveil the mystery of that great separation which until then had waited impenetrable, questionable, almost unapproachable in his memory. Perhaps for a long time he hardly dared ask himself: ‘Why so apart, so alone? Renouncing everything I admired, even admiration? Why this severity, this suspicion, this hatred of one’s own virtues?’ But now he dares to ask it loudly, and already hears something like an answer. ‘You had to become your own master, and also the master of your own virtues. Previously, your virtues were your masters; but they must be nothing more than your tools, along with your other tools. You had to gain power over your For and Against, and learn how to hang them out or take them in, according to your higher purpose. You had to learn that all estimations have a perspective, to learn the displacement, distortion, apparent teleology of horizons, and whatever else is part of perspective; also the bit of stupidity in regard to opposite values and all the intellectual damage that every For or Against exacts in payment. You had to learn to grasp the necessary injustice in every For and Against; to grasp that injustice is inseparable from life, that life itself is determined by perspective and its injustice. Above all you had to see clearly wherever injustice is greatest, where life is developed least, most narrowly, meagrely, rudimentarily, and yet cannot help taking itself as the purpose and measure of things, and for the sake of its preservation picking at and questioning secretly and pettily and incessantly what is higher, greater and richer. You had to see clearly the problem of hierarchy, and how power and justice and breadth of perspective grow upward together. You had to –’ Enough, now the free spirit knows which ‘thou shalt’ he has obeyed, and also what he now can do, what he only now is permitted to do.

(Human, All Too Human, 1878)

This is Nietzsche’s list of what he learned through his own troubled years. The point is not that we should learn the same things; but that we should try to understand what it is that we (and those we are close to) have learned by painful experience.

And finally there is an evocation of the ordinary, simple good things which may once have been ignored or thought not worthy of attention, but which – now – can be appreciated.