The last of Nietzsche

 During this year he was periodically overtaken by periods of euphoria. His initial meeting with Turin triggered just such an excessive rush of enthusiasm. His letters repeatedly describe Turin as possessing everything of the best: from the gelat: to the quality of the air. The cafés were the most beautiful he had ever seen, the ice creams the most delicious he had ever eaten. The food was wonderfully digestible. Without exception, Turin’s little trattorie provided the cheapest and best nourishment in the world! His intestines could cope with anything in this place. 

He found lodgings in the center of town, perched high on the third floor of number 6, Piazza Via Carlo Alberto. The splendid view from his window looked out over the magnificent piazza to the rippling pink-and-white Baroque facade of Palazzo Carignano, where King Victor Emmanuel II had been born. Nietzsche enjoyed informing his many correspondents of this fact. 

Adjacent to Nietzsche’s apartment was the Galleria Subalpina, a glass-and-wrought-iron behemoth built some ten years previously in the heyday of the international passion for erecting Crystal Palaces. The Subalpina’s long gallery was on the scale of a railway station without all the tiresome bother of trains. Fifty meters long and 

and

HE HAD No companions during his time in Turin. Not even any visitors. The days were spent working furiously, tempo fortissimo, on the book he had begun in Sils-Maria. 

The Antichrist, subtitled A Curse on Christianity, is a short, vitriolic work that hurls abuse at Christianity. The word Antichrist in German may mean “Antichrist” or “anti-Christian.” Nietzsche preserves his respect for the person of Jesus Christ throughout, while damning the religion that subsequently grew up in His name. 

A great deal of the book revisits what he has already said in Tw1light of the Idols and On the Genealogy of Morality. 

He reiterates his thoughts concerning Christianity’s dishonesty in devaluing life on earth against the hypothetical life to come. This erroneous favoring of cotton-wool-cloud eternity over trash-heap ev, eryday reality powered ressentiment, the vengeful, jealous, morally superior mindset used by priests to subdue whole populations whom they managed to reduce to slave mentality. 

The whole fictitious world of religion was rooted in hatred of Nature and profound unease concerning reality. And so the entire realm of subsequent morality throughout the Christian world was invalidated, because everything fell under this concept of imaginary cause and effect. Christianity’s hostility to reality was unsurpassed, Once the concept of “nature” had been branded as counter to the idea of God, the whole natural world had been branded reprehensible, including man’s nature, which, unimproved, was condemned as damnable. 

Nietzsche makes it clear that his condemnations are reserved for the Church and priests rather than for Jesus Christ, the founder of the religion, whom he admires and reveres. 

In an unspoken reference to Dostoyevsky, he suggests that Christ, the holy anarchist who roused up the lowly, the outcast and the sinners to oppose the ruling order, would be banished to Siberia today. Christ had died for political rather than religious reasons. The proof for this was the inscription on the Cross. The words “King of the Jews” were dynamite. It would always be a threatening title so long as the Jews had no physical territory to call their own. 

Christ, “the bringer of glad tidings,” died as He lived and as He taught-not to redeem mankind but to demonstrate how one ought to live. What He bequeathed to mankind was His practice. It was demonstrated in His bearing before the judges, before the guards, before every kind of mockery and calumny and finally in His bearing on the Cross. Not to resist the evil man, the unjust situation, even to love it; this was supreme absence of ressentiment. This was amor fati, eternal affirmation. 

The subsequent Christian Church had been molded by the second-rate interpreter St. Paul. It was he who turned Christ’s exemplary life into a legend of guilt sacrifice in its most repulsive and barbaric form. The blood sacrifice of the innocent man for the sins of che guilty--what atrocious paganism! It was Paul who focused ha cred against the world and hatred against flesh. It was he who gathered up every opportunity to spread ressentiment. Paul had guessed how you can use a small, sectarian movement to kindle a worldwide fire, how you can use the symbol of God on the Cross to take everything lying below, everything filled with secret rebellion, the whole inheritance of hidden anarchistic activities in the Roman Empire, and unite them into the mighty power that became the Christian Church. 

It is a translation of Christianity into politics that would hold up better without the last section in the book, where Nietzsche takes on the role of God by delivering a final judgment. As with much of his writing at this time, it is impossible to judge whether he is exercising extreme Swiftian satire or extreme seriousness, or if it simply represents a temporary spike in a graph tracking a mind that is growing unstable. 

It is headed: 

Given on the Day of Salvation, on the first day of the year one (September 30, 1888, according to the false calculation of time) 

°War to the death against vice: the vice 1s Christianity. 

All priests should be locked up. 

Participation in church services is an attack on public morality. 

The execrable location where Christianity brooded over its basilisk eggs [Israel? Jerusalem?] should be razed to the ground. Being the most depraved spot on earth, it should be the horror of all posterity. 

Poisonous snakes should be bred on top of it. 

The preacher of chastity is the real sinner. 

And

On the strength of his relationship with Georg Brandes, Nietzsche wrote to the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, asking him to undertake the translation of Ecce Homo into French. Nietzsche introduced himself to Strindberg through the by-now-customary letter telling of his Polish ancestry, his impeccable physical health, his world fame and the perfection to which he had brought the German language; “I speak the language of the rulers of the world.” He further tempted Strindberg with the promise that Prince Bismarck and the young Kaiser were to receive advance copies of the book “together with a written declaration of war-military men will then be unable to retaliate by taking police measures.” Strindberg himself was not at the greatest moment of mental stability in his life. He had no money, his first marriage to the wife he worshipped was crashing to disaster and they were living in a wing of a dilapidated castle overrun with peacocks and feral dogs and ruled over by a self-styled countess and her companion, a blackmailer, alchemist, magician and thief. It was an overheated concatenation of circumstances that gave rise to Strindberg’s greatest play, Miss Julie, but even in this chaotic context, Strindberg realized that something was very wrong with Nietzsche. Was Nietzsche mad? he asked Brandes. 

 It is not clear what exactly happened ON THE MORNING OF January 3, 1889. The story is they saw him as usual leaving Davide Fino’s corner house on the Piazza Carlo Alberto. They were used to the sad and solitary figure wrapped in thought, often on his way to the bookshop, where he was known to sit for hours with the book pressed very close to his face, reading but never making a purchase. The piazza was full of tired old horses drooping between the traces of carts and cabs waiting for fares: miserable jut-ribbed nags being tormented into some semblance of work by their masters. On seeing a cabbie mercilessly beating his horse, Nietzsche broke down. Overwhelmed by compassion, sobbing at the sight of it, he threw his arms protectively around the horse's neck, and collapsed. Or so they said. Crises are so quickly come and gone. Eyewitnesses see so many different truths. 

Somebody must have known which house he lived in, for Davide Fino was summoned. The police, too. Had it not been for Fino, Nietzsche would have been taken off straightaway and quite possibly lost forever in the dark labyrinth of Italian institutions for the insane, but Davide Fino brought him home. 

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In 1888, KatseR WILHELM I had died at last, at the age of ninety. Seventeen years previously, he had accepted the German crown in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, to Nietzsche’s great distress and fear for the imbalance of Europe. In the intervening years, the Kaiser and his Iron Chancellor Bismarck had famously forged the archconservative and repressive Second Reich on industrialization, capitalism, unscrupulous expansionism, the Protestant Church, artistic conservatism and censorship. All this had coagulated into one massive, congested, sclerotic, nationalist, repressive and authoritarian world power-as Nietzsche had feared would happen. Even while the edges of Nietzsche’s mind were fraying, he had not let go of his horror of the Second Reich. His final megalomaniac ravings in Turin had dwelled on his imagined power to have the Kaiser, Bismarck and all antiSemites shot. 

The last decade of the century ought to have been a time of optimism, an era of artistic innovation, as it was in France. But the dawn of the new emperor, Wilhelm II, failed to illumine the German horizon. Even his own army officers, who in 1914 would follow him into the First World War, were confidentially describing the new Kaiser in 1891 as “too changeable, too capricious, particularly in small things, too many incautious remarks... Does not seem to know himself what he wants. Rumours about psychological disturbance.”® 

Political uncertainty was coinciding with the jumpy spirituality that always goes with the looming close of a century. Where was the revolutionary iconoclast, asked Count Harry Kessler, a student at the University of Leipzig at the time: “A secret Messianism developed in us. The desert which every Messian needs was in our hearts, and suddenly there appeared above it, like a meteor, Nietzsche.”? It was 

Harry Kessler moved in the highest social, political and military circles throughout Europe. His family was rich, his mother stupendously beautiful: he was widely supposed to have been fathered by Kaiser Wilhelm I, an untrue supposition (the timing doesn’t work) that did him no harm. Both Bismarck and the Kaiser treated him as a favorite young hope of the side. Harry Kessler would become a secret agent and an officer in the First World War, Germany’s ambassador to Warsaw in 1918, an art activist, art patron and museum curator. He would ride in a cab with Nijinsky on the first night of The Rite of Spring and he would close Nietzsche’s eyes when they had opened again in his coffin. He was the complete cosmopolitan. Had Nietzsche been capable of comprehending, he would have approved of Harry Kessler becoming a founding trustee of the Nietzsche archive. 

Slim and elegant as a greyhound, multilingual, erudite, supremely well connected but never the grand seigneur, in 1891 the twenty-three-year-old student Kessler sniffed the air and found the future Nietzschean. Throughout the next forty years he promoted the new vision through the theaters, publishing houses, artists’ studios and duchesses’ drawing rooms of Europe until 1933, when he fled Germany on the Nazi assumption of power, and another story took over the pages of the history books. 

As a university student in the late 1880s and early ‘90s, Harry Kessler was part of “the Raskolnikov generation”: those on whom Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment had a profound effect. Kessler served as witness at the trial of a highborn fellow student who shot and killed his working-class girlfriend, after which the murderer failed to kill himself because his shot into his own chest was not well aimed.”° It was a nihilist act inspired by Dostoyevsky’s book, which made an unquantifiable impression on the first postChristian despairing generation. A rash of such murders among students overcome by “the great disgust,” the will to nothingness, became known as “the Raskolnikov effect” after the anti-hero in Dostoyevsky’s book.” 

Into this end-of-the-century mood of nihilism, of Schopenhauerian pessimism, moral despair and wondering what, if anything, was worth striving for, Kessler describes Nietzsche as making an impact as profound and as widespread as Byron had made upon a previous generation. 

Shipwrecked souls desperately seeking resolution between skepticism and a longing for peace, the generation clung to Nietzsche's removal of meaning from its illusory position outside of life, replacing it back into life itself. They venerated Nietzsche as a truly free spirit, a solitary voice extolling individualism, offering an alternative both to the decline of faith and to the steady assault of science upon the anthropomorphic assumption of the human ego. Nietzsche had created for them the possibility of meaning as something completely personal rather than, as Johann Fichte put it, “a lifeless household item one can put aside or pick up as one wishes.” If faith was dead, philosophy remained worthwhile in its ability to justify the very soul of the person who adopted, and adapted, it. 

The book that most affected Kessler was Beyond Good and Evil, with its Argonaut of the spirit who sailed uncharted seas in search of a new way to interpret the world, and new moral values to suit modern circumstances. Kill God, yes, but put the Ubermensch in His place. The Ubermensch as the outcome of a personal metaphysical struggle through the will to power existing in everyone and everything-though the struggle it depicts is not necessarily against others but against the petty emotions in oneself, such as envy and resentment. 

The Ubermensch, rather than the will to power, was the concept that made Zarathustra such a cult text at the end of the century. A pathbreaking book for the avant-garde, it provided a way out of impasse and decadence. It sanctified the earth without the need for justification through Heaven and Hell. Nietzsche set the joyful dance of the Hellenic gods against the Church-dependency that had  Accounted for the degeneration and diminution of Christian European man into the perfect herd animal. Amor fati flung the rope over the new nihilistic abyss over the centuries of envy and resentiment which had dragged the individual down to the level of the untermensch

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The form of Nietzsche’s work was having a great and immediate impact on the arts of the 1890s also. What in fact had been imposed on Nietzsche by his illness-his short, aphoristic, often non-sequential bursts that at first sight appeared disorganized and unfinished-was seized upon as a direct and arrestingly modern way of communication. Strindberg’s plays are notorious for jettisoning the classical theatrical unities of time, space and action and for being incomprehensible on the page because they do not follow a logical progression, while being electrifying on stage for the same reason. Munch didn’t clear up dribbles and splashes of paint; he left whole areas of canvas naked and unpainted. It was the painterly equivalent of the powerful effect of the half-glimpsed, the suggestive quality of the aphorism that Nietzsche had first seized upon in Sorrento, and upon which he built the powerful and extraordinarily modern strategy of “the philosopher of perhaps,” a position which gave him the power to end an aphorism, a train of thought or even an entire book with an ellipsis,  Bring the reader in charge of the conclusion while at the same time acknowledging that objective truth is not even conceivable for humans striving for it mere illusion. 

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Rise of the Novel

 Ian Watt

(a) 

The greatness of Descartes was primarily one of method, of the thoroughness of his determination to accept nothing on trust; and his Discourse on Method (1637) and his Meditations did much to bring about the modern assumption whereby the pursuit of truth is conceived of as a wholly individual matter, logically independent of the tradition of past thought, and indeed as more likely to be arrived at by a departure from it. 

The novel is the form of literature which most fully reflects this individualist and innovating reorientation. Previous literary forms had reflected the general tendency of their cultures to make conformity to traditional practice the major test of truth: the plots of classical and renaissance epic, for example, were based on past history or fable, and the merits of the author’s treatment were judged largely according to a view of literary decorum derived from the accepted models in the genre. This literary traditionalism was first and most fully challenged by the novel, whose primary criterion was truth to individual experience-individual experience which is always unique and therefore new. The novel is thus the logical literary vehicle of a culture which, in the last few centuries, has set an unprecedented value on originality, on the novel; and it is therefore well named. 

This emphasis on the new accounts for some of the critical difficulties which the novel is widely agreed to present. When we judge a work in another genre, a recognition of its literary models is often important and sometimes essential; our evaluation depends to a large extent on our analysis of the author’s skill in handling the appropriate formal conventions. On the other hand, it is surely very damaging for a novel to be in any sense an imitation of another literary work: and the reason for this seems to be that since the novelist’s primary task is to convey the impression of fidelity to human experience, attention to any pre-established formal conventions can only endanger his success. What is often felt as the formlessness of the novel, as compared, say, with tragedy or the ode, probably follows from this: the poverty of the novel’s formal conventions would seem to be the price it must pay for its realism. 

And

.... nevertheless a broad and necessarily summary comparison between the novel and previous literary forms reveals an important difference: Defoe and Richardson are the first great writers in our literature who did not take their plots from mythology, history, legend or previous literature. In this they differ from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, for instance, who, like the writers of Greece and Rome, habitually used traditional plots; and who did so, in the last analysis, because they accepted the general premise of their times that, since Nature is essentially complete and unchanging, its records, whether scriptural, legendary or historical, constitute a definitive repertoire of human experience, 

This point of view continued to be expressed until the nineteenth century; the opponents of Balzac, for example, used it to deride his preoccupation with contemporary and, in their view, ephemeral reality. But at the same time, from the Renaissance onwards, there was a growing tendency for individual experience to replace collective tradition as the ultimate arbiter of reality; and this transition would seem to constitute an important part of the general cultural background of the rise of the novel. 

It is significant that the trend in favour of originality found its first powerful expression in England, and in the eighteenth century; the very word ‘original’ took on its modern meaning at this time, by a semantic reversal which is a parallel to the change in the meaning of ‘realism’. We have seen that, from the mediaeval belief in the reality of universals, ‘realism’ had come to denote a belief in the individual apprehension of reality through the senses: similarly the term ‘original’ which in the Middle Ages had meant ‘having existed from the first’ came to mean ‘underived, independent, first-hand’; 

And

Locke had defined personal identity as an identity of consciousness through duration in time; the individual was in touch with his own continuing identity through memory of his past thoughts and actions.! This location of the source of personal identity in the repertoire of its memorics was continued by Hume: ‘Had we no memory, we never should have any notion of'causation, nor consequently of that chain of causes and effects, which constitute our self or person’.? Such a point of view is characteristic of the novel; many novelists, from Sterne to Proust, have made their subject the exploration of the personality as it is defined in the interpenetration of its past and present self-awareness. 

Time is an essential category in another related but more external approach to the problem of defining the individuality of any object. The ‘principle of individuation’ accepted by Locke was that of existence at a particular locus in space and time: since, as he wrote, ‘ideas become general by separating from them the circumstances of time and place’,3 so they become particular only when both these circumstances are specified. In the same way the characters of the novel can only be individualised if they are set in a background of particularised time and place. 

Both the philosophy and the literature of Greece and Rome were deeply influenced by Plato’s view that the Forms or Ideas were the ultimate realities behind the concrete objects of the temporal world. These forms were conceived as timeless and unchanging,* and thus reflected the basic premise of their civilisation in general that nothing happened or could happen whose fundamental meaning was not independent of the flux of time. This premise is diametrically opposed to the outlook which has established itself since the Renaissance, and which views time, not only as a crucial dimension of the physical world, but as the shaping force of man’s individual and collective history. 

The novel is in nothing so characteristic of our culture as in the way that it reflects this characteristic orientation of modern thought. E. M. Forster sees the portrayal of ‘life by time’ as the distinctive role which the novel has added to literature’s more ancient preoccupation with portraying ‘life by values’;: Spengler’s perspective for the rise of the novel is the need of ‘ultrahistorical' modern man for a literary form capable of dealing with ‘the whole of life’; while more recently Northrop Frye has seen the ‘alliance of time and Western man’ as the defining characteristic of the novel compared with other genres.

We have already considered one aspect of the importance which the novel allots the time dimension: its break with the earlier literary tradition of using timeless stories to mirror the unchanging moral verities. The novel’s plot is also distinguished from most previous fiction by its use of past experience as the cause of present action: a causal connection operating through time replaces the reliance of earlier narratives on disguises and coincidences, and this tends to give the novel a much more cohesive structure. Even more important, perhaps, is the effect upon characterisation of the novel’s insistence on the time process. The most obvious and extreme example of this is the stream of consciousness novel which purports to present a direct quotation of what occurs in the individual mind under the impact of the temporal flux; but the novel in general has interested itself much more than any other literary form in the development of its characters in the course of time. Finally, the novel’s detailed depiction of the concerns of everyday life also depends upon its power over the time dimension: T. H. Green pointed out that much of man’s life had tended to be almost unavailable to literary representation merely as a result of its slowness;* the novel’s closeness to the texture of daily experience directly depends upon its employment of a much more minutely discriminated time-scale than had previously been employed in narrative. 

The role of time in ancient, mediaeval and renaissance literature is certainly very different from that in the novel. The restriction of the action of tragedy to twenty-four hours, for example, the celebrated unity of time, is really a denial of the importance of the temporal dimension in human life; for, in accord with the classical world’s view of reality as subsisting in timeless universals, it implies that the truth about cxistence can be as fully unfolded in the space of a day as in the space ofa lifetime. The equally celebrated personifications of time as the winged chariot or the grim reaper reveal an essentially similar outlook. They focus attention, not on the temporal flux, but on the supremely timeless fact of death; their role is to overwhelm our awareness of daily life so that we shall be prepared to face eternity. Both these personifications, in fact, resemble the doctrine of the unity of time in that they are fundamentally ahistorical, and are therefore equally typical of the very minor importance accorded to the temporal dimension in most literature previous to the novel. 

Shakespeare’s sense of the historical past, for example, is very different from the modern one. Troy and Rome, the Plantagenets and the Tudors, none of them are far enough back to be very different from the present or from each other. In this Shakespeare reflects the view of his age: he had been dead for thirty years before the word ‘anachronism’ first appeared in English,! and he was still very close to the mediaeval conception of history by which, whatever the period, the wheel of time churns out the same eternally applicable exempla. 

This a-historical outlook is associated with a striking lack of interest in the minute-by-minute and day-to-day temporal setting, a lack of interest which has caused the time scheme of so many plays both by Shakespeare and by most of his predecessors from Aeschylus onwards, to baffle later editors and critics. The attitude to time in early fiction is very similar; the sequence of events is set in a very abstract continuum of time and space, and allows very little importance to time as a factor in human relationships. Coleridge noted the ‘marvellous independence and true imaginative absence of all particular space or time in the ‘‘Faerie Queene” ’;2 and the temporal dimension of Bun. yan’s allegories or the heroic romances is equally vague and unparticularised. 

Soon, however, the modern sense of time began to permeate many areas of thought. The late seventeenth century witnessed the rise of a more objective study of history and therefore of a deeper sense of the difference between the past and the present, At the same time Newton and Locke presented a new analysis of the temporal process;? it became a slower and more mechan. ical sense of duration which was minutely enough discriminated to measure the falling of objects or the succession of thoughts in the mind. 

These new emphases are reflected in the novels of Defoe. His fiction is the first which presents us with a picture both of the individual life in its larger perspective as a historical process, and in its closer view which shows the process being acted out against the background of the most ephemeral thoughts and actions. It is true that the time scales of his novels are sometimes both contradictory in themselves, and inconsistent with their pretended historical setting, but the mere fact that such objections arise is surely a tribute to the way the characters are felt by the reader to be rooted in the temporal dimension. We obviously could not think of making such objections seriously to Sidney’s Arcadia or The Pilgrim’s Progress; there is not enough evidence of the reality of time for any sense of discrepancies to be possible. Defoe does give us such evidence. At his best, he convinces us completely that his narrative is occurring at a particular place and at a particular time, and our memory of his novels consists largely of these vividly realised moments in the lives of his characters, moments which are loosely strung together to form a convincing biographical perspective. We have a sense of personal identity subsisting through duration and yet being changed by the flow of experience. 

This impression is much more strongly and completely realised in Richardson. He was very careful to locate all his events of his narrative in an unprecedentedly detailed timescheme.

And

In the towns, however, it is likely that semi-literacy was much commoner than total illiteracy. In London especially: the general spread of shop names instead of signs, which struck a Swiss visitor, Carl Philipp Moritz, as unusual, in 1782,! surely implies that it was being increasingly assumed that written communications would be understood by a large enough proportion even of the denizens of Gin Lane to be worth addressing to them. 

Opportunities for learning to read seem to have been fairly widely available, although the evidence strongly suggests that popular schooling was at best casual and intermittent. An educational system as such hardly existed; but a miscellaneous network of old endowed grammar schools and English schools, charity schools and non-endowed schools of various kinds, notably dame schools, covered the country, with the exception of some outlying rural areas and some of the new industrial towns of the north. In 1788, the first year for which adequate 

Women of the upper and middle classes could partake in few of the activities of their menfolk, whether of business or pleasure. It was not usual for them to engage in politics, business or the administration of their estates, while the main masculine leisure pursuits such as hunting and drinking were also barred. Such women, therefore, had a great deal of leisure, and this leisure was often occupied by omnivorous reading. 

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, was an avid novel reader, asking her daughter to send a list of novels copied down from newspaper advertisements, and adding: ‘I doubt not that at least the greater part of these are trash, lumber, etc. However, they will serve to pass away the idle time. . . .’3 Later, and at a definitely lower social level, Mrs. Thrale recounted that by her husband’s orders she ‘was not to think of the kitchen’ and explained that it was as a result of this enforced leisure that she was ‘driven . . . on literature as [her] sole resource’.4 

Many of the less well-to-do women also had much more leisure than previously. B. L. de Muralt had already found in 1694 that ‘even among the common people the husbands seldom make their wives work’;5 and another foreign visitor to England, César de Saussure, observed in 1727 that tradesmen’s wives were ‘rather lazy, and few do any needlework’. These reports reflect the great increase in feminine leisure which had been made possible by an important economic change. The old household duties of spinning and weaving, making bread, beer, candles and soap, and many others, were no longer necessary, since most necessities were now manufactured and could be bought at shops and markets. This connection between increased 

feminine leisure and the development of economic specialisation 

¥ No. rae. 2 Act II. 

2 2b ase ewer 

was noted in 1748 by the Swedish traveller, Pehr Kalm, who was surprised to find that in England ‘one hardly ever sees a woman here trouble herself in the least about outdoor duties’; even indoors, he discovered, ‘weaving and spinning is also in most houses a rare thing, because their : many man save them from the necessity of such’.! Y ufactures 

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The traditional view was that class distinctions were the basis of social order, and that consequently leisure pursuits were only proper for the leisure classes; and this outlook was strongly reinforced by the economic theory of the day which opposed anything which might keep the labouring classes away from their tasks. There was therefore considerable agreement among the spokesmen both of mercantilism and of traditional religious and social thought that even reading constituted a dangerous distraction from the proper pursuits of those who worked with their hands. Robert Bolton, Dean of Carlisle, for instance, in his Essays on the Employment of Time (1750), mentions the possibility of reading as a pastime for the peasant and mechanic, only to reject it summarily: ‘No, the advice to him is, Observe what passes’.! 

The opportunities of the poor for any extensive impropriety in this direction were in any case very small. Hours of work for labourers in the country included all the hours of daylight, and even in London they were from six in the morning to eight or nine at night. The usual holidays were only four-Christmas, Easter, Whitsun and Michaelmas, with the addition, in London, of the eight hanging days at Tyburn. It is true that labourers in favoured occupations, especially in London, could and did absent themselves from work fairly freely. But in the main conditions of work were not such as to give appreciable leisure except on Sundays; and then six days of labor ipse voluptas usually led to the seventh’s being devoted to activities more extrovert than reading. Francis Place thought that drink was almost the only working-class recreation during the eighteenth century;? and it must be remembered that cheap gin made drunkenness available for less than the cost of a newspaper. 

For those few who might have liked to read there were other difficulties besides lack of leisure and the cost of books. There was little privacy, as, in London especially, housing was appallingly overcrowded; and there was often not enough light to read by, even by day. The window tax imposed at the end of the seventeenth century had reduced windows to a minimum, and those that remained were usually deepset, and covered with horn, paper or green glass. At night lighting was a serious problem, since candles, even farthing dips, were considered a luxury. Richardson was proud of the fact that as an apprentice he bought them for himself,! but others could not, or were not allowed to. James Lackington, for example, was forbidden to have light in his room by his employer, a baker, and claims to have read by the light of the moon! 

There were, however, two large and important groups of relatively poor people who probably did have time and opportunity to read-apprentices and household servants, especially the latter. They would normally have leisure and light to read by; there would often be books in the house; if there were not, since they did not have to pay for their food and lodging, their wages and vails could be devoted to buying them if they chose; and they were, as ever, peculiarly liable to be contaminated by the example of their betters. 

It is certainly remarkable how many contemporary declamations against the increased leisure, luxury and literary pretensions of the lower orders specifically refer to apprentices and domestic servants, especially footmen and waiting-maids. In assessing the literary importance of this latter group it must be remembered that they constituted a very large and conspicuous class, which in the eighteenth century probably constituted the largest single occupational group in the country, as was the case, indeed, until within living memory. 

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 If the book sellers did little or nothing to promote the rise of the novel directly there are some indications that as an indirect result of their role in removing literature from the control of patronage and bringing it under the control of the laws of the markct-place, they both assisted the development of one of the characteristic technical innovations of the new form—its copious particularity of description and explanation and made possible the remarkable independence of Defoe and Richardson from the classical critical tradition which was an indispensable condition of their literary achievement. 

Once the writer’s primary aim was no longer to satisfy the standards of patrons and the literary élite, other considerations took on a new importance. Two of them, at least, were likely to encourage the author to prolixity: first, to write very explicitly and even tautologically might help his less educated readers to understand him easily; and secondly, since it was the bookseller, not the patron who rewarded him, speed and copiousness tended to become the supreme economic virtues. 

This second tendency was pointed out by Goldsmith when he considered the relationship between the bookseller and the author in his Enquiry into the Present State of Learning (1759): ‘ There cannot perhaps be imagined a combination more prejudicial to taste than this. It is the interest of the one to allow as little for writing, and of the other to write as much, as possible.’» Goldsmith’s view here finds some confirmation in the fact that the specific accusation that an author wrote diffusely for economic reasons became fairly common in the early eighteenth century; John Wesley, for example, suggested somewhat uncharitably that Isaac Watts’s long-windedness was ‘to get money’.? The possibility that this tendency may also have influenced the rise of the novel finds some support in the fact that somewhat similar charges were also levelled at both Defoe and Richardson. 

The most obvious result of the application of primarily economic criteria to the production of literature was to favour prose as against verse. In Amelia (1751) Fielding’s hackney author makes this connection very clear: ‘A sheet is a sheet with the booksellers; and, whether it be in prose or verse, they make no difference’, Consequently, finding that rhymes ‘are stubborn things’, the denizen of Grub Street turns away from writing poetry for the magazines and engages in the production of novels, For two reasons: because ‘romance writing is the only Branch of our business that is worth following and because it is certainly the easiest work in the world you may write it almost as fast as you can set pen to paper.

What's Bred in the Bone

 The roads around it were certainly bad, but they had always been bad so long as they had been roads, and the people who used them accepted them as facts of their existence. If the greater world wished to approach Blairlogie, it could very well do so by the train which made the sixty-mile journey from Ottawa over a rough line, much of it cut through the hardest granite of the Laurentian Shield, a land mass of mythic antiquity. Blairlogie saw no reason to be easily accessible. 

The best of the town’s money and business was firmly in the hands of the Scots, as was right and proper. Below the Scots, in a ranking that was decreed by money, came a larger population of Canadians of French descent, some of whom were substantial merchants. At the bottom of the financial and social heap were the Poles, a body of labourers and small farmers from which the upper ranks drew their domestic servants. Altogether the town numbered about five thousand carefully differentiated souls. 

The Scots were Presbyterian, and as this was Canada at the turn of the century their religious belief and their political loyalty were the important conditioning factors in their lives. These Presbycerians might have had some trouble in formulating the doctrine of predestination or foreordination which lay deep in their belief, but they had no practical difficulty in knowing who was of the elect, and who belonged to a creation with a less certain future in Eternity. 

The French and the Poles were Roman Catholics, and they too knew precisely where they stood in relation to God, and were by no means displeased with their situation. There were a few Irish, also Catholics, and some odds and ends of other racial strains-mongrels of one sort and another-who had mean churches suited to their eccentricities, dwindling toward a vacantstore temple that changed hands from one rampaging evangelist to another, in whose windows hung gaudy banners displaying the Beasts of the Apocalypse, in horrendous detail. There were no Jews, blacks, or other incalculable elements. 

The town could have been represented as a wedding-cake, with the Poles as the large foundation layer, bearing the heaviest weight; the French, the middle layer, were smaller but central; the Scots were the topmost, smallest, most richly ornamented layer of all. 

And

“I don’t want to over-value the litcle thing.” 

‘Oh, I see: you don’t want to fall into the sin of pride? Well, don't shrink from pride only to fall into hypocrisy. You’ve had a dog’s lite, Corniche, brought up half Catholic and half Protestant, in a wretched hole where you got the worst of both those systems of double-dealing.” 

“Easy, Meister! I have detected a good Catholic in you.” 

“Perhaps, but when I am working as an artist I banish all char. Catholicism has begotten much great art; Protestantism none at all-not a single painting. But Catholicism has fostered art in the very teeth of Christianity. The Kingdom of Christ, if it ever comes, will contain no art; Christ never showed the least concern with it. His church has inspired much but not because of anything the Master said. Who then was the inspirer? The much-maligned Devil, one supposes. It is he who understands and ministers to man’s carnal and intellectual self, and art is carnal and intellectual.” 

“You work under the wing of the Devil, do you?” 

“I must, if I am to work at all. Christ would have had no time for a man like me. Have you noticed how, in the Gospels, He keeps so resolutely clear of anybody who might be suspected of having any brains? Good-hearted simpletons and women who were little better than slaves, those were His followers. No wonder Catholicism had to take a resolute stand in order to include people of intellect and artists; Protestantism has tried to reverse the process. Do you know what I should like, Corniche?” 

“A new revelation?” 

“Yes, that might come of it. I should like a conference to which Christ would bring all His saints, and the Devil would bring all his scholars and artists, and let them have it out.” 

“Who would judge the result?” “That’s the sticker. Not God, certainly, as the father of both leaders.” 

&

“I am sure your colleague will be glad to give his reasons,” said Huygens, the peacemaker. “If they are truly convincing, we shall call back the experts from Britain, who will make scientific appraisals.” 

“} don’t think you will need to do that,” said Francis. “The picture has been put forward as a van Eyck, and s¢ cercainly is nor by van Eyck, either Hubertus of Jan. Flave any of you gen « visited the zoo lately?” 

What was this about the z00? Was the young man erfling a them? 

“A detail of the painting tells us all we need to know,” Francis continued. “Observe the monkey who hangs by his tail from the bars of Hell, in the upper left-hand corner of the piccure. What is he doing there?” 

“It is an iconographical detail that one might expect in such a picture,” said Letztpfennig somewhat patronizingly toward the young man, glad to defend the monkey. “The chained monkey is an old symbol of the fallen mankind that preceded the coming of Christ. Of souls in Hell, in fact. He belongs with the defeated devils.” 

“But he is hanging by his tail.” 

“Since when do monkeys not hang by their tails?” 

“They did not do so in Ghent in van Eyck’s day. That monkey is a Cebus capucinus, a New World monkey. The chained monkey of iconography is the Macacus rhesus, the Old World monkey. Such a monkey as that, a monkey with a prehensile tail, was unknown in Europe until the sixteenth century, and I need not temind you that Hubertus van Eyck died in 1426. The painter, whoever he is-or was-wanted to complete his composition with a figure, not too commanding, in that particular spot, so the chained monkey had to be hanging by his tail from the bars of Hell. There are several examples of both Cebus capucinus and Macacus rhesus informatively labelled in your very good local zoo. That is why J mentioned it.” 

&

“You seem to want to create a new Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” said one of the best, a large man of Ukrainian antecedents named George Bogdanovich. ‘You can’t get away with it, y'know, Buy some pictures. Sure, we're glad to sell pictures. But don’t try to be a big influence. Just leave us alone. We know what we're doing.” 

What they were doing was respectable enough, but it did not appeal to Francis. They were utterly in love with the Canadian landscape, and tried to come to terms with it in a variety of ways, some of which, Francis knew, were admirable, and a handful splendid. “But no people ever appear in your pictures,” he said, again and again. “Don’t want ’em,” said Bogdanovich, answering for all. “The people stink. Most of ’em, anyway. We paint the country, and maybe after a while the people will learn about the country from the pictures, and stink a little less. Got to begin with the country. 

That’s consolation and exaltation. We have to do it our own way.” 

There could be no quarrelling with that. There were painters, of course, who followed the newest, fashionable trends. Without being pressed, they would explain that they dipped deep into their own Unconscious-a word that was new to Francis in this context-and drew up conceptions that were expressed in pictures that might be gaudy and rather messy rearrangements of what they saw, or felt; some were carefully wrought arrangements of colours, usually dingy. These messages from the Unconscious were deemed to be infinitely precious, evoking in sensitive viewers some hint of an Unconscious deeper than any they could explore unaided. But Francis was not impressed. What had Ruth said? “You can’t talk to the Mothers by getting them on the phone. They have an unlisted number.” These delvers clearly did not have the number. It was such fakers of a chthonic inner vision whom Francis grew to detest above all others. 

So Francis had to content himself with buying pictures that he thought good, but did not much like. Without being quite sure how it happened he found that he was taking pictures from painters who lived in inaccessible places, and keeping them in his 

The Rebel Angels

 -_eae 

“[’'m getting on with the work that will eventually make me a Doctor of Philosophy.” 

“Ah, that blessed degree that stamps us for life as creatures of guaranteed intellectual worth. But what’s your special study?” 

“That’s rather complicated. I come under the general umbrella of Comparative Literature, but that’s a house of many mansions. Working with Professor Hollier I shall certainly do my thesis on something in his line.” 

“Which isn’t just what I’d call Comparative Literature. Rooting about in the kitchen-middens and trash-heaps of the Middle Ages. What was it he made his name with?” 

“A definitive study of the establishment of the Church Calendar, by Dionysius Exiguus. A lot of it had been done before, but it was Hollier who showed why Dionysius reached his conclusions-the popular belief and ancient custom that lay behind the finished work, and all that. It was what established him as a really great paleo-psychologist.” 

“Have mercy, God! Is that some new kind of shrink?” “You know it isn’t. It’s really digging into what people thought, 

in times when their thinking was a muddle of religion and folk. belief and rags of misunderstood classical learning, instead of being what it is coday, which I suppose you’d have to call a muddle of materialism, and folk-belief, and rags of misunderstood scientific learning. Comp. Lit. gets mixed up with it because you have to know a lot of languages, but it spills over into the Centre for the Study of the History of Science and Technology. Hollier is cross-appointed there, you know.” 

“No, I didn’t know.” “There’s a lot of talk about establishing an Institute of Advanced Studies; he’d be very important there. It will come as soon as the university can get its hands on some money.” 

“That may not be soon. Our fatherly government is growing restless about the big sums universities consume. It’s the people's money, dear Maria, and don’t you ever forget it. And the people, those infallible judges of value, must have what they want...

And

“A stunner, isn’t she?” said Urky to Arthur, but with his eye on Hollier. “Tell me just as a matter of interest, where would you place her in the Rushton Scale?” 

We all looked blank at this. 

“Surely you know it? Devised by W. A. H. Rushton, the great Cambridge mathematician? Well, it’s this way: Helen of Troy is accepted as the absolute in female beauty, and we have it ona poet’s authority that her face launched a thousand ships. But clearly ‘face’ implies the whole woman. Therefore let us call a face that launches a thousand ships a Helen. But what is a face that launches only one ship? Obviously a millihelen. There must be a rating for all other faces between those two that have any pretension whatever to beauty. Consider Garbo; probably 750 millihelens, because although the face is exquisite, the figure is spare and the feet are big. Now Maria seems to me to be a wonder in every respect that I have had the pleasure of examining, and her clothes are plainly not meant to conceal defects. So what do we say? I’d say 850 millthelens for Maria. Anybody bid higher? What do you say, Arthur?” 

“I'd say she’s a friend of mine, and I don’t rate friends by mathematical computation,” said Arthur. 

And

“Civilization rests on two things,” said Hitzig; “the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it to you, where would this splendidly civilized occasion be without both?” 

“Fermentation is undoubtedly science,” said Gyllenborg; “but voluntary inhibition must be psychology, and if anybody suggests that psychology is a science I shall scream.” 

“No, no; you are on my ground now,” said Stromwell; “inhibition of defecation is in essence a theological matter, and unquestionably one of the effects of the Fall of Man. And that, as everybody now recognizes, means the dawn of personal consciousness, the separation of the individual from the tribe, or mass. Animals have no such power of inhibition, as every stage manager who has to get a horse on and off stage without a mishap will assure you. Animals know themselves but dimly-even more dimly than we, the masters of the world. When Man ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge he became aware of himself as something other than a portion of his surroundings, and he dropped his last, carefree turd, as he, with wandering steps and slow, from Eden took his solitary way. After that he had, literally, to mind his step, not to speak of his Ps and Qs.” 

" ‘His solitary way’,” said Penny Raven. “Just like Milton, the Old sour-belly! What about Eve?” 

“Every child repeats the experience of recognizing himself as unique,” said Hitzig, ignoring the feminist outburst. 

“Every child repeats the whole history of life, beginning as a fish, before he begins to experience inhibition,” said Gyllenborg, 

“Every child repeats the Fall of Man, quits the Paradise of the womb, and is launched into the painful world,” said Stromwell, “Sub-Warden, have those people up the way completely forgotten that decanters are supposed to be passed?” 

I tore myself away from a disquisition by Arthur Cornish on loan-sharking-of which of course he disapproved, although it fascinated him-and made another tour of the table to see that everyone was all right, and speed the decanters on their way, They had come to rest in front of Professor Mukadassi, who did not drink wine, and seemed absorbed in the talk of Hollier. | was glad Clem was enjoying himself, because he is not really a clubbable man. 

“What I call culrural fossils,” he was saying, “are parts of human belief or behaviour that have become so imbedded in the sur. rounding life that nobody questions them. I remember going to church with some English relatives when I was a boy, and noticing that a lot of the country women, as they came in, made a tiny curtsy to a blank wall. When I asked why, nobody knew, but my cousin inquired of the vicar, and he said that before the Reformation a statue of the Virgin had stood there, and although Cromwell’s men had destroyed it, they could not destroy the local habit, as evinced in the women’s behaviour. Years ago I paid a brief call at Pitcairn Island, and it was like stepping back into the earliest days of the nineteenth century; the last immigrants to that island were soldiers from Wellington’s troops, and their descendants still spoke the authentic speech of Sam Weller, and said ‘Vell, sir’, and ‘Werry good’. When my Father was a boy every wellbrought-up Canadian child learned that ‘herb’ was pronounced without the ‘h’; you still hear it now and again, and modern Englishmen think it’s ignorance, though it’s really cultural history. These things are trifles, but among races that keep much to themselves, like some of the nomads of the East, or our surviving real Gypsies, all kinds of ideas persist, that are worth investigating. We tend to think of human knowledge as progressive; because we know more and more, our parents and grandparents are back numbers. But a contrary theory is possible-that we simply recognize different things at different times and in different ways. 

Which throws a new light on the whole business of mythology; the myths are not dead, just different in understanding and application. Perhaps superstition is just myth, dimly perceived and unthinkingly revered. If you chink superstition is dead, visit one of our examination halls, and count the fetishes and ju-jus that che students bring in with them.” 

“You don’t take that seriously,” said Boys. 

“Quite seriously,” said Hollier. 

“You speak of one of the great gaps in understanding between East and West,” said Mukadassi. “In India we know that men every bit as good as we believed things that the advanced members of society look on as absurdities. But I agree with you, Professor; our task is not to scorn them but to try to discover what they meant and where they thought they were going. The pride of Science encourages us to this terrible folly and darkness of scorning the past. But we in the East take much more account of Nature in our daily life than you do. Perhaps it is because we are able to be out-of-doors more than you. But if I may say it-and you must not think I would wound your susceptibilities, Professorno, no, not for the world-but your Christianity is not helpful about Nature. None the less, Nature will have her say, and even that Human Nature that Christianity so often deplores. I hope I do not give offence?” 

Hollier was not offended; Mukadassi exaggerated the hold Christianity had on him. “One of my favourite cultural fossils,” said he, “is the garden gnome. You have observed them? Very cute objects; very cute indeed. But do people want them simply for cuteness? I don’t believe it. The gnomes provide some of that Sugar in the drink of belief that Western religion no longer offers, and which the watered-down humanitarianism that passes with so many people for religion offers even less. The gnomes speak of a longing, unrecognized but all the stronger for its invisibility, for the garden-god, the image of the earth-spirit, the kobold, the kabir, the guardian of the household. Dreadful as they are, they have a truth you won’t find in the bird-bath and the sundial.” 

And

“Not at all, Warden. Every senior person in the University world knows how much thieving, for instance, goes on in that world, and everybody conspires to keep quiet about it. Probably the conspiracy is a wise one, because there would be a row if it ever became a matter of public knowledge. But what are. you to expect? A university like this is a community of fifty thousand people; if you lived in a town of fifty thousand, wouldn’t you expect some of them to be thieves? What is stolen? Everything from trifles to costly equipment, from knives and forks to whole sets of Communion vessels from the chapels, which are whisked off to South America, I happen to know. It is stupid to pretend that students have no part in it, and probably members of faculty, if we knew. There are explanations: all institutions arouse the larceny in the human heart, and pinching something from the Alma Mater is a revenge taken on behalf of some unacknowledged part of the human spirit, for the Bounteous Mother’s superiority of pretension. Not for nothing were students known to our ancestors as St. Nicholas’s clerks-learned and thievish alike. Good God, Warden, have you forgotten that only three years ago a Visiting professor who stayed in this College tried to get away with the curtains off his windows? He was a learned man, but he was also in the grip of the universal desire to steal.

And

I left parish work and became a scholar-priest because I wante, to dig deep in mines of old belief that were related, as I hav, Said, to those texts which the compilers of the Bible had no, thought suitable for inclusion in the reputed Word of God. Tha was what I had done and my work had attracted some favourable attention. But he who troubles his head with apocryphal texts will not do so long before he peeps into heretical texts, and without any intention of becoming a Gnostic I found myself greatly taken up with the Gnostics because of the appeal of so much that they had to say. Their notion of Sophia seized upon my mind because it suited some ideas that | had tentatively and fearfully developed of my own accord. 

I like women, and the lack of a feminine presence in Christianity has long troubled me. Oh, I am familiar with all the apologies that are offered on that point: I know that Christ had women among his followers, that he liked to talk to women, and that the faithful who remained with him at the foot of his Cross were chiefly women. But whatever Christ may have thought, the elaborate edifice of doctrine we call his church offers no woman in authority-only a Trinity made up, to put it profanely, of two men and a bird-and even the belated amends offered to Mary by the Church of Rome does not undo the mischief. The Gnostics did better than that; they offered their followers Sophia. 

Sophia, the feminine personification of God’s Wisdom: ‘With you is Wisdom, she who knows your works, she who was presen! when you made the world; she understands what is pleasing 1? your eyes, and what agrees with your commandments.’ Sophia; through whom God became conscious of himself. Sophia, by whose agency the universe was brought to completion, a partnef jn Creation. Sophia-in my eyes at least-through whom the chill glory of the patriarchal God becomes the embracing splendour of a completed World Soul. 

And

 It was not a place I would have chosen to provide tender, loving care. It was one of those houses stiff with Good Taste, and Mrs. Hollier, whom I had never met, was stiff with Good Taste too. I was left in the drawing-room-positively the palest, most devitalized room I have ever been in-while the men and Mrs. Hollier lugged the invalid upstairs; after a while an elderly housekeeper toiled upward with what looked like a cup of bouillon; after an even longer while Darcourt, and Dr. Greene, and Mrs. Hollier returned and I was introduced as a student of the professor’s, and Mrs. Hollier gave me a look that could have etched glass, and nodded but did not speak. The doctor was talking reassuringly about a drop in blood pressure that was dramatic but not really alarming, and the necessity for rest, light diet, and detective stories when the patient seemed ready for them. He would keep in touch. 

I felt very much out of things. Darcourt and Dr. Greene were the kind of Canadians who understood and could cope with such refrigerated souls as Mrs. Hollier. A Northern land and its Northern people can be brisk and bracing when faced with a metaphysical ill, bue I was not of their kind. I had a disquieting feeling that, when Hollier was ill, this was the place where he belonged. However much an intellectual adventurer he might be, this cold home was his home. 

Teleology

 From Leroi

Although I have counterposed, as he does, Aristotle’s use of teleological and material explanation, he clearly thinks that usually there is no conflict between them at all. When explaining the association of parts he sometimes appeals to functional harmony, sometimes to bodily cconomics, but often ecumenically opts for both. Rays have cartilaginous skeletons because they need to be flexible given how they swim and because, having spent all their earthy matter on their hard skins, they don’t have anything left for the skeleton. Such double-barrelled arguments appear to be redundant, but in fact they're not; they are merely missing an additional premise. For Aristotle, functional demands and the allocation of resources are harmonized because ‘nature does nothing in vain’. In their Principles of Animal Design (1998) Weibel and Taylor call this the ‘principle of symmorphosis’. 

The history of Western thought is littered with teleologists. From fourth-century Attica to twenty-first-century Kansas, the Argument from Design has never lost its appeal. Aristotle and Darwin, however, share the more unusual conviction that though the organic world is filled with design there is no designer. But if the designer is dead for whose benefit is the design? It’s the prosecutor’s question: cui bono? 

Darwin answered that individuals benefit. Biologists have batted the question about ever since. The answers that they’ve essayed are: memes, genes, individuals, groups, species, some combination or all of the above. Aristotle, however, generally appears to agree with Darwin: organs exist for the sake of the survival and reproduction of individual animals. This is why so much of his biology seems so familiar. 

Yet there isa deep difference between Aristotle’s teleology and Darwin's adaptationism, one that appears when we follow the chain of explanation that any theory of organic design invites. Why does the elephant have a trunk? To snorkel. Why must it snorkel? Because it’s slow and lives in swamps. Why is it slow? Because it’s big. Why is it big? To defend itself. Why must it defend itself? Because it wants to survive and reproduce. Why does it want to survive and reproduce? Because... 

Because natural selection has designed the elephant to reproduce itself. Darwin gave teleology a mechanistic explanation. He halted the march of whys. It is for this reason that Ogle celebrated Darwin as Democritus reincarnated. For, where Aristotle’s organismal teleology is imposed upon recalcitrant matter, Darwin showed how, given a few simple conditions, it emerges from it. Darwin is an ontological reductionist; Aristotle is not. 

Why, then, should Aristotelian animals strive to survive and reproduce? Aristotle can hardly invoke natural selection. (He’s dismissed at least one version of it.) He could have said ‘they just do’, and left it at that, but then he would not be Aristotle, so he does have an answer, beautiful and a little mystical. Living things, he says, desire to survive and reproduce so that they can ‘participate in the eternal and the divine’. When he asserts that living things desire to participate in the eternal he means that they are designed not to become extinct. Cui bono? It turns out that organismal design is not, after all, for the sake of individuals, for they always die, but to ensure that their forms kinds, their species, persist for ever. 

When Aristotle speaks of the divine he is not the point must be made again invoking a divine craftsman for none exists; rather, he is telling us that immortality is a property of divine things and that reproduction makes animals a little bit divine. 

We are beginning to touch on Aristotle’s theology, his ultimate explanation for why the cosmos is arranged the way it is and its relationship to an immortal God. Why should animal kinds be immortal? This is where we come to the end of explanation, to one of those indemonstrable axioms that lie at the bottom of every Aristotelian science, and from which all else flows, and it is simply this: it is better to exist than not to exist. 

Friday

 By Michel Tournier

He stopped two paces away from it. Out of the mass of hair a single green eye with a dark oval pupil was staring at him. Robinson recalled that, owing to the wide set of their eyes, the majority of quadrupeds can look at things only in a one-eyed fashion, and that a charging bull cannot see the adversary it is charging. A strange sound issued from the hairy statue obstructing his path, like a deep belly chuckle. With fear exacerbating his state of extreme fatigue, Robinson was overtaken by a violent fit of anger. Raising his cudgel, he brought it down with all his strength between the goat’s horns. There was a crunching sound, the animal sank on its knees and then rolled over on its side. It was the first living creature Robinson had encountered on the island, and he had killed it. 

And

as 

Today I can measure the folly and malice of those who affect to despise money, that divine institution. Money spirstualizes all that it touches by endowing it with a quality that is both rational (measurable) and universal, since property reckoned in terms of money is accessible to all men. Venality is one of the cardinal virtues. The venal man suppresses bis murderous and anti-social instincts-honor, selfpride, patriotism, political ambition, religious fanaticism, racialism-in favor of his need to co-operate with others, bis love of fruitful exchanges, his sense of buman solidarity. The term, the Golden Age, should be taken literally, and I see now that mankind would swiftly achieve tt were its affairs wholly in the bands of venal men. Alas, it is nearly always high-minded men who make lnstory, and so the flames destroy everything and blood flows in torrents. The plump merchants of Venice afford us an example of the luxurious happiness possible in a state governed solely by the law of lucre, whereas the emaciated wolves of the Spanish Inquisition show us the infamies of which men are capable when they have lost the love of material well-being. The Huns would soon have checked their advance if they had known how to profit by the riches they acquired. Encumbered with their gains, they would have stayed to enjoy them, and life would have resumed its course. But they were disinterested savages. They despised gold. They rushed onward, burning as they went. 

&

His meditations took another course. He became interested in the proceedings of a male hymenoptera which visited only one variety of orchid, and not, it seemed, for the purpose of foraging. Robinson spent long hours with his glass trying to determine what the creature was doing. He noted first that the flower was an exact reproduction of the abdomen of the female insect, to the point of offering a sort of vagina which probably exuded a specific aphrodisiac scent calculated to attract and seduce the male. The insect did not pilfer the flower for its nectar; rather it teased it, and then made love to it according to its own methods of propagation. In doing so its posture was such that the pollen contained in two sacs was deposited on its forehead, where it adhered to two sticky scales; and thus adorned with vegetable scales, the deceived lover flew from male to female flower, serving the orchid species while believing it furthered its own affairs. This wonderful mingling of subterfuge and ingenuity was enough to make one doubt the sobriety of the Creator. Had the natural world been contrived by an infinitely wise and majestic God, or by a baroque Demiurge driven to the wildest whimsicalities by his love of the bizarre? Repressing these doubts, Robinson reflected that there might be trees on the island which, like the orchids with the hymenoptera, might be disposed to make use of himself for the transference of their pollen. And the branches of the trees were transformed in his mind into voluptuous and scented women whose rounded bodies were waiting to receive him... 

This process of insemination at a distance, devised by the cruelly separated plants, seemed to Robinson both moving and supremely elegant, and he even dreamed of some fantastic variety of bird which, after charging itself with the seed of the Governor of Speranza, would fly to York to fecundate his deserted wife. But he reflected that being so long without news of him, she must now consider herself a widow, if indeed she had not abandoned widowhood to marry again. 

&

Journal 

Last night my right arm, which was hanging down from my couch, went to sleep, or “died.” I took it in my left hand and lifted it up, that lifeless, heavy object of flesh and bone that might have been a part of some other person, attached to me in error. I dream of thus handling my whole body, marveling at the dead weight, lost in the paradox of this thing which is myself. But is it really me? I remember my feeling as a child when, being taken into a church in York, I saw a stained-glass window depicting the martyrdom of St. Denis. The saint had been decapitated on the steps of the Temple, and the headless body bent down and picked up the head in its two big hands... . What caused me to marvel was not merely this evidence of prodigious vitality, To me in my infant piety the divine miracle was a commonplace, and besides, I had myself seen a duck running with its bead cut off. No, the true marvel was that being deprived of his head, St. Denis had sought for it in the stream into which it had rolled, and that he had picked it up so carefully, with such affectionate solicitude. If it were I who had been beheaded | would certainly not have gone running after that unsightly object whose red hair and freckles were the bane of my life! How bitterly I deplored them, my flaming head of hair, long, skinny arms, legs like stilts, and white body like that of a plucked goose with here and there a fluff of pinkish down. My hearty dislike of all this gave me a view of myself which has only achieved its fullness on Speranza. For some time indeed I have been performing an act of surgery on myself which consists of stripping away in turn all my attributes-I say all-like peeling an onion. And at the same time I am constructing, separate from myself, a man called Crusoe, Christian name Robinson, six feet tall, etc. ... and I watch him live and grow on this island, without participating in his good fortune or suffering from his bad luck. What “I” is this? The question is far from an idle one, nor is it even unanswerable. Because if it is not him then it must be Speranza. There is a fiuttering “I” which comes to rest now on the man and now on the island, making of me one and the other by turns. 

Is this not what is called “philosophy,” this that I have just written? What strange transformation is taking place within me that I, the most positive and least speculative of men, should be not only putting such questions to myself but, as it would seem, answering them! I must return to this matter, 

Journal 

That strange amazement with which we open our eyes in the morning! Nothing better testifies to the fact that sleep is an experience in its own right, and as it were a rehearsal of death. Of all the things that can happen to the sleeper, awakening is certainly the one he least expects, and the one for which he is least prepared. No nightmare can so greatly dismay him as that sudden return to light, another light. There can be no doubt that for the sleeper the act of sleeping is final. The soul bas taken flight from the body without a backward look or thought of return. It has forgotten everything, cast everything aside, when suddenly and barsbly it is compelled to resume the discarded garment of flesh, its babits and its life.... 

So presently I shall lie down and let myself slip into the darkness forever. A strange alienation. The sleeper is a mina unbinged that thinks itself dead. 

The problem of existence. If someone bad told me a few years ago that the absence of my fellows would cause me to doubt my own existence I would have laughed, just as I did when “universal consent” was offered as a proof of the existence of God. “The majority of men at all trmes and in all places have believed in the existence of God. Therefore God exists.” How absurd! The most absurd of all the proofs of the existence of God, miserably insufficient compared with that marvel of force and subtlety, the ontological argument.

But now I know otherwise. | know that untversal consent is the only proof-and not only of the existence of God.

To exist-what do the words mean? It means to be outside-sistere ex. That which is outside exists. That which is within does not. My thoughts, images, and dreams do not exist. If Speranza is no more than a sensation, or bundle of sensations, then she does not exist. And I myself exist only msofar as I escape from myself to join with others. 

What complicates the position is that the thing which does not exist does its utmost to persuade us of the contrary. There is a great and universal urge toward existence among the non-existent. Something like a centrifugal force seeks to spread outward everything that moves within me, images, dreams, projects, fantasies, desires, obsessions. That which does not ex-sist in-sists, It insists upon existing. All the small world contained within me is knocking at the door of the great, the real world, And it ts others, those who are outside, auho hold the key. In the past, when I tossed in my sleep, my wife would shake me by the shoulders to wake me and dispel the insistence of the nightmare, But now... But why do I keep returning to this subject? 

All those who knew me, all without exception, believe me dead. My own belief in my existence is opposed to that unanimous belicf. No matter what | do,I cannot prevent that picture of Robinson's dead body from existing m all ther minds. This alone, though certainly it does not kill me, suffices to remove me to the uttermost confines of life, to a place bung between Heaven and Hell-in a word, to Limbo. Speranza, or the Limbo of the Pacific... 

This state of half-death at least helps me to understand the deep, positive, and seemingly ineluctable relationship between sex and death. Being closer to death than any other man, | am by the same token closer to the very springs of sexuality. 

Sex and death... Their close association was first made clear to me in the dissertations of Samuel Gloaming, an elderly York eccentric, a herbalist and taxidermist, whom I visited now and then of an evening in bis shop filled with stuffed animals and dried herbs, He had devoted a lifetime’s thought to the mysteries of creation, and he said that life was fragmented into an infinite number of entities differing as widely as possible each from the other, so that it might have a no less infinite chance of surviving the vicissitudes of its environment. Were the earth to be frozen to a block of ice, or burned by the sun to a desert of stone, most of the creatures om its surface would perish, but thanks to their variety a few would still remain, capable of adapting themselves to the changed conditions. It was this multiplicity of creatures which in bis view made reproduction necessary, that is to say, the transference of life from the old to the mew; and he insisted that this was a sacrifice of the individual to the species, since in the act of procreation the individual loses something of bis substance, Thus sexuality is the living presence, ominous and mortal, of the species in the essence of the individual. To procreate is to bring forth a new generation which innocently but inexorably will thrust its predecessor toward extinction. No sooner do the parents cease to be indispensable than they begin to become burden. some, The child casts aside bis parents as naturally as he took from them all that he needed for his growth. The instinct which brings the sexes together is then an instinct of death. But Nature bas thought it prudent to disguise ber Stratagem, transparent though it is, and what appears to be the self-indulgence of lovers is in reality a course of mad self-abnegation. 

I bad been pondering these matters when I bad occasion to visit a part of northern Ireland which was grievously afflicted by famine. The survivors strayed like ghostly skeletons along the village streets, and the bodies of the dead were burned on pyres to guard against the risk of plague, more deadly than the famine itself. Most of the corpses were male, so true is it that women are capable of greater endurance than men, and they told a strange story: emaciated though they were, dratned of substance like leathern dolls of string end bone, tbe sexual organ, end this alone, was monstrously end tronically enlarged, more rigid and distended, in a word more triumpbant, than probably it bad ever been in life. This apotheosis in death of the genitals shed an added light on Samuel Gloaming’s words, evoking in my mind a dialogue berween the individual , The affirmation of life, and sex, the affirmation of death. By the light of day man in his right mind represses what is undesirable he diminishes and disdains it but under the influence of darkness warmth and languor the enemy revives and unsheathes his sword and diminishes the man makes of him a lover plunges him into a brief ecstasy then closes his eyes and the lover couched on Earth, lost in the rapture of forgetfulness and renunciation of self sinks into that little death which is sleep.

&

For although Sunday was officially a day of rest, it was not a day of culpable idleness. Rising at dawn, Friday swept and garnished the Meeting Hall. Then he woke his master and recited the morning prayer with him; following which they went together to the Meeting Hall, there to join in a ceremony of worship after the Quaker fashion, lasting two hours. Standing at the lectern, the master read passages from the Scriptures, interrupted by long periods of meditation and enlightened with commentaries inspired by the Holy Spirit. Kneeling on the left side of the Hall, the right being reserved for women, Friday listened devoutly to words such as sin, salvation, hell-fire, damnation, Mammon, and apocalypse, which if they conveyed no precise meaning to his mind, nevertheless had a magical effect, one of obscure, disturbing beauty. And now and then a picture would emerge -for example, of a man swallowed by a whale who escaped unscathed, of a country beset by a plague of frogs so numerous that they were to be found in the beds 

Beyond Good and Evil

Nice promised well until February 23, 1887, when his ink bottle assumed a life of its own and started jumping about on his desk like a performing flea. The house rattled and trembled. Other houses roundabout collapsed and fell. Half-dressed people poured into the shattered streets. Never before had he witnessed panic prevail. The only soul impervious to the general terror was an old and very pious lady who was convinced that the good Lord was not entitled to do her any harm. The earthquake destroyed the room in the Pension de Genéve where he had written the third and fourth parts of Zarathustra. This left him badly disturbed by the transience of things, which now demonstrably included his own recent history.' 

He made an inventory of his worldly possessions. They amounted to some shirts, trousers, two coats, slippers and shoes, shaving and writing paraphernalia, the club foot and a saucepan that Elisabeth had sent him that he had never managed to get to grips with. He had published fifteen books. The last had sold a hundred copies. His existence was dependent on a pension from a Christian university. Following the increasingly anti-religious tenor of his books, he expected it to be withdrawn at any time. 

By his own estimation, he was now seven-eighths blind. Bright lights had always caused excruciating pain. A new general blurring, together with spots dancing about his field of vision, was providing him with daily ocular justification for pondering the nature of what we take for reality. 

Seen from the outside, Nietzsche's life during 1886 and 1887 looks quiet and harmless but it was during this time that, with all the fury of the neglected prophet, he was examining the foundations of our moral and intellectual traditions and taking a hammer to them in the books of his mature philosophy. 

The affirmative part of his philosophy was done. Zarathustra had set fingerposts on the path of life pointing the way for the Yea-sayer, the post-religious man prepared to take on for himself the doubts. 

inconsistencies and horrors of the world. But Zarathustra’s cry had not been heard. The task of the new books was “as clear as it could be”: Zarathustra would be made plain. 

This time Nietzsche would not present his thoughts in biblical parody or dressed up as the epic legend of a hero. Nor would he bury this new book. As no publisher had the slightest interest in publishing his work, he would publish it himself. He would have it printed privately at his own expense in an edition of six hundred copies. If he sold three hundred he would get his money back. Surely that was not impossible? 

Beyond Good and Evil (1886) was subtitled Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Unlike Zarathustra, it is a thick book of nearly two hundred pages but even so, he felt the need to write a further book, to clarify this book that he had written to clarify Zarathustra. And so the next book that followed on Beyond Good and Evil was called On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) and subtitled By Way of a Clarification and Supplement to My Last Book. 

Taking up the role of the philosopher of perhaps and the cave minotaur of conscience, he set himself up in angry opposition to society's indolent, good-natured, moral apathy in clinging to the Judeo-Christian code of morality while no longer believing in the religion itself. This was to live by hypocrisy and untruth! To live like three-quarter Christians! 

A hundred years following God's death, Nietzsche predicted, his shadow would still be cast on the walls of the cave. The cave minotaur would explore the dangerous perhaps in order to scrub the walls clean, to redefine ideas of good and evil-if indeed such things as good and evil exist. Such an examination required a critique of civilization itself, a critique of the foundations of modernity, of the modern sciences, the modern arts and modern politics. As such, it was to be a “nay-saying” to what he described as the degeneration of modernity. Such a nay-saying could only be valid if it began with an examination of truth.’ 

“Supposing that truth is a woman,” the first sentence of the introduction to Beyond Good and Evil begins arrestingly, “and why not? Aren't there reasons for suspecting that all philosophers, to the extent that they have been dogmatists, have not really understood women?” 

What do we take for truth? The lofty edifices of European thinking. But they rest on the cornerstones of dogmatists who from time immemorial based their theories on a mixture of folk superstition such as the superstition about souls-and some daring generalizations from very limited human, all-too-human, experiences. 

Man cannot live without such untruths. He cannot bear life without measuring reality by purely invented fictional systems such as philosophy, astrology and religion. These three monsters have roamed the earth through the ages, and we have shaped the architecture of our superstitious beliefs in their image. Man had originally been free, but he had bricked himself into beliefs, madly constructing Zoroastrian observatories, Greek and Roman temples, Egyptian tomb pyramids and Christian cathedrals. He chose to erect an architecture of fear and awe, whose very foundation is the terror that death might lead to nothing more than oblivion. We have enslaved ourselves to priests, astrologers and philosophers. Their influence is gricvous, and dangerous to man’s psychology. 

We must call into question our notions of good and evil as eternal absolutes rather than fleeting conventions. The place to start is with the man who inculcated his hocus-pocus idea that absolute truth exists: Plato. 

The most protracted of all errors throughout the last two thousand ycars has been Plato's invention of pure spirit. With this invention, Plato cast a drab, cold, gray net of concepts over the rainbow whirlwind of the senses-the rabble of the senses, as he called them? 

Was the nature of truth really to be found in Plato’s famous cave where people, chained to a wall, were unable to turn their heads and realize that the things they saw on the walls of the cave were merely the shadows of real objects held up against the fire blazing behind them? Deluded, they took the shadow show for reality or “truth.” 

Thos Phito burdened us with the idea of the difference between appearance and reality, His theory of form assumed that there existed the ideal form of every thing. From the form of the color red to the form of justice, apparently there existed the ultimate, and ultimately unknowable, benchmark for every object and quality. Schopenhauer called on Plato’s theory of forms in his own theory of will and representation, a theory of a purely invented world that Nietzsche had already refuted in Human, All Too Human by grasping Voltaire’s bright torch of reason and casting its dazzling light onto the shadowy walls of the cave.4 

Philosophers are no better than cunning pleaders for their prejudices, sly spokesmen for their ideas which they baptize “truths.”> Philosophers are snake oil salesmen of the soul. Their doctrines amount to edicts imposing selftyranny upon human nature. Philosophy always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise. Philosophy is glorification of universalization. It is imposition. It seeks to make all existence exist only after its own image. Philosophy is a “tyrannical drive, the most spiritual will to power, to the ‘creation of the world,’ to the causa prima.”® 

As for science, it is no better. The conclusions of the knowledgemicroscopists provide no more truth than do the philosophers. The meaning of science is not religion. Yet science, somehow, is becoming substituted for religion. The modern world is mistaking scientific theory for moral dogma. 

“Now it is beginning to dawn on maybe five or six brains that physics too is only an interpretation and arrangement of the world (according to ourselves! if | may say so) and not an explanation of the world. But to the extent that physics rests on belief in the senses, it passes for more, and will continue to pass for more, namely for an explanation, for a long time to come. It has our eyes and our fingers as its allies, it has visual evidence and tangibility as its allies. This helped it to enchant, persuade, convince an age with a basically plebeian taste.” But what has been explained? Only that which can be seen and felt7 

Interpretation of the world by “Darwinians and anti-teleologists” leads Nietzsche to step back from his earlier outright condemnation of Plato’s theory of the ideal. It at least offered us “a type of enjoyment,’ in contrast to scientists who labor with the “greatest possible stupidity” and the “smallest possible force” to appeal to “g sturdy industrious race of machinists and bridge-builders of the future.” 

While humans rapturously hail natural laws, what they really want is to reverse the theory of the natural. “Living isn’t that wanting specifically to be something other than this nature? Isn’t living assessing, preferring, being unfair, being limited, wanting to be different?”? 

Having sown alarming doubt in every direction, he proposes that the philosopher of the dangerous perhaps finds the idea of untruth just as interesting as the idea of truth. Why not inspect truth from multiple perspectives? From, for example, frog perspective?"? Given that truth, as he has already told us, is as mysterious as the nature of a woman, he goes back to the point that the eternal feminine is incapable of truth because “what does truth matter for a woman! Nothing is so utterly foreign, unfavorable, hostile for women from the very start than truth,-their great art is in lying, their highest concern is appearance and beauty.”” 

All truths are only personal interpretations. We are nothing but our memory and our mental states existing in the society in which we belong-a statement that the last sentence in the above paragraph certainly confirms. His late philosophy was vengefully misogynistic. Lou, having turned down his marriage proposals on the grounds that as a free spirit she would never marry, had recently dealt him another hammer blow by the announcement of her engagement to Fred Andreas. Nietzsche never replied to her letter. Apart from an unrevealing letter to Malwida commenting contemptuously that “nobody knows who this Andreas is,” he kept his thoughts and emotions to himself.'? 

Having examined the nature of truth, Beyond Good and Evil goes on to examine the nature of self, This Nietzsche does through examining the consequences of saying “I think,” in a bravura passage that wobbles the very foundations of Western thinking by deconstruct ing Descartes’s famous “I think therefore I am.” 

“People said that ‘I’ was a condition and ‘think’ was a preaicate and conditioned-thinking is an activity and a subject must be thought of as its cause.” What if the reverse were true? What if “think” were the condition and “I” the conditioned? In that case, “T’ would be a synthesis that only gets produced through thought itself.” '3 It is impossible to be sure that there is an “I” who thinks, impossible to know that it has to be something at all which thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of an entity thought of as a cause. It is impossible to know that what is designated as “thinking” has already been determined-that I know what thinking is. Might “I” not be merely a synthesis produced by thinking? 

“Whoever dares to answer these metaphysical questions right away with an appeal to a sort of intuitive knowledge, like the person who says: ‘I think and know that at least this is true, real, certain.--he will find the philosopher of today ready with a smile and two question marks. ‘My dear sir, the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, ‘it is improbable that you are not mistaken: but why insist on the truth?’ ”"4 

That which we experience in dreams becomes just as much a part of the total economy of our souls as anything we have “really” experienced. Psychology rather than dogma is the key to making sense of the world." 

Having called into question the nature of self and declared objective truth to be an impossible fiction, he mischievously goes on to point out that to assert that objective truth is a fiction is to make a statement of objective truth which must itself be a fiction. 

This leaves us gazing into an endless succession of looking glasses dizzyingly reflecting-what?-truth?-or the vertiginous perspective of endless perhaps? We are left to solve that problem for ourselves. Distrusting all system-builders, Nietzsche steadfastly refuses to build a system for us. He loves to contradict himself in the realm of ideas, and to force us into the position of the free spirit who is independent of him. 

To establish whether one is ready for independence one must not cling to anything, not even a sense of one’s own detachment. Few are made for such independence. walkers, those who are daring to 

It is the privilege of the tightrope the point of recklessness, 

LEAVING THE MEDITATION on the free spirit, Nietzsche turns to address religion with a typically robust and attention-getting opening, asserting pugnaciously that the past almost two thousand years had overseen the protracted suicide of reason by means of the imposition of religious doctrine upon the individual. Through his own personal experience of the conflict between self-realization and selfabnegation to religious doctrine, Nietzsche feels entitled to conclude that the first human sacrifice to religion is the sacrifice of one’s own true nature. 

How did we willingly adopt the Judeo-Christian values that turned us into obedient cattle? Why did we adopt what Nietzsche calls the slave morality? He takes the term from the fact that historically Jews and Christians were slaves, first in Babylon, then under the Roman Empire. Powerless to impose their will upon the world but lusting after power, the slaves were eaten up with resentment against their masters. Asserting their only possible revenge, they inverted values by incorporating their grievances into a religion that imposed glorification on their own miserable and suffering condition.’® 

Sensuality and lust for power were demonized. The words “riches” and “power” became synonyms for evil. Christianity was a denial of the will to life made into a religion. Christianity hated life and hated human nature; it poisoned the world by denying the realities of human nature, turning everything into a conflict between “ought” and “is.” The morality born in slavery perpetuated slavery, giving continuing meaning to the nihilism of the downtrodden. 

Nietzsche specifically chooses the French word ressentiment to describe the foundation of slave morality. Ressentiment is a word witha fuller meaning than mere resentment and jealousy. It is a neurosis, a need to inflict pain upon the self as well as upon the other. Ressentiment encompasses the position of the resentful powerless who lack (or enjoy the lack of) the means to purge their resentment by taking revenge. And so, ressentiment led the slaves to lie their weakness into strength, to “take revenge on Rome and its noble and frivolous tolerance” by overturning the previous morality of power and superiority, and replacing it with the moral superiority of victimhood and the glorification of the downtrodden. 

As St. Augustine observed, resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other man will die. 

How pip tis bizarre reversal of values come about’ How did asceticism come to triumph over the life-affirming values? 

While Nietzsche both raised and partially answered this in Beyond Good and Evil, he had by no means finished with it. In June 1887, he began On the Genealogy of Morality, A Polemic, giving it a title that noticeably attests to the contemporary post-Darwinian preoccupation with the question of descent. As usual, he wrote it very quickly, in about four weeks. The book contains three long essays whose intention is to excavate the very roots of the family tree of morality, proposing to dig even further back in time than JudeoChristianity. It would investigate the time when man left the sea to walk on two feet. 

At some moment in prehistory, he conjectures, there arose some specific practice that was bad for the community. It led to the imposition of punishment. This was the moment of the construction of morality; this was when our instincts were first reined in by a punitive society. Over time, the imposition of punishment led to introspection. Introspection led to conscience. 

Conscience, then, is the price of social structure and it is the toll taken on the soul when the Judeo-Christian ascetic tradition with its “thou shalt not” buries our most natural instincts beneath the deadly burden of guilt. Instincts that are not discharged outwardly become internalized. Burdened with bad conscience, we turn against ourselves in misery and self-loathing that is stoked by the legend of original sin and by the asceticism imposed by priests. The concept of existential neurosis would come later, but this is undoubtedly what Nietzsche was describing as he drew a picture of modern man who has “no external enemies or obstacles but rips himself apart, persecutes himself, gnaws at himself, gives himself no peace, he is like an animal who batters himself raw on the bars of his cage.”'”7 How can we be liberated from our imprisoning bars of bad conscience and self-disgust in the cage constructed by the ascetic priest? The antidote to the slave morality is the morality of the Ubermensch; the free, affirmative, independent spirit. The moral quality of this higher man is driven by his life force, his will to power. Though Nietzsche saw evolutionary theory as describing a merely moral-free means of preserving life, his “will to power” obviously owes a great deal to Darwin's survival of the fittest, but Nietzsche takes it further. Nietzsche’s will to power is both a symbol of man’s potential and a parable of the importance of self-overcoming. 

No part of organic life is static. From infancy onwards we are after power. All organic life is constantly in a dynamic and chaotic condition of creation and decay: of overpowering and being overpowered. The tree root pulverizing the bedrock is the will to power. The expanding ice cracking the cliff and redrawing the shoreline is the will to power. It is in the microscopic moss spore in a roof tile of the palace, whose burgeoning into a green sponge will cause a flurry of footmen to rush around with buckets-or even result in the collapse of the roof and the regime. The will to power is never still. It is the ever-shifting dynamic of every personal relationship and all relationships between groups and between countries. 

He says the will to power is an emotion, the emotion of command. What is called freedom of the will is essentially superiority with respect to something that must obey. But this something need not be outside ourselves. Nietzsche is also talking about self-mastery. “The one who wills takes his feeling of pleasure as the commander, and adds to it the feelings of pleasure from the successful instruments that carry out the task, as well as from the useful ‘under-wills or under-souls-our body ts, after all, only a society constructed out of many souls.” 

The man who has mastered himself is able to withstand the ur

certainty sown by the multiple perspectives of “perhaps.” With the courage to desert certainties, any idea of a “result” or a “conclusion” is obsolete. And so the “higher man” or “superman” or “free spirit” or Ubermensch or “philosopher of the future” or “philosopher of perhaps” or “Argonaut of the spirit”-call him what you will-is playful. Life is no longer a table of laws. It is a dance to the music of “what if?” Awareness of ourselves and awareness of the world around us both depend on the conception that we ultimately do not understand either ourselves or the world. He who gazes into the void finds the void gazing back into him. It is hardly a comfortable position. But woe betide you if you do not have the courage to live by the principle of “what if?,” because then you are one of the “last men,” the three-quarter Christians who enjoy the religion of comfortableness by clinging to outdated certainties. It is true that there is no such thing as truth-perhaps. 

On The Genealogy of Morality is the book in which the blond beast (“die blonde Bestie”) prowls onto the stage. Nietzsche probably owes his tainted reputation as much to those words as to any others. 

The blond beast has become understood as a racial classification and a creature of political purpose: Nietzsche’s Aryan superman prefiguring Hitler's 1935 racial laws of German Honor and German Blood. But this is a grotesque misrepresentation. There are five mentions of the blond beast and three “blond beast” passages in Nietzsche's writing and none of them have anything to do with racial classification, let alone the idea of a master race. 

In the first passage, Nietzsche is exploring how the concepts of good, bad and evil first arose in the early civilizations. He is describing how the oldest form of state emerged from the mists of prehistory. He does not say what period of history he is talking about, or even what part of the world, but he leaves us in no doubt that the blond beast who takes command and builds the first states is the savage ancestor common to all races: 

“At the center of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory; this hidden center needs release, from time to time the beast must out again, must return to the wild:-Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings-in this requirement they are all alike. It was the noble races which left the concept of the ‘barbarian’ in their traces wherever they went; even their highest culture betrays the fact that they were conscious of this and indeed proud of it.” The inclusion of Arabs, Greeks and Japanese here surely argues that Nietzsche was more excited by the euphony of putting the two words “blond” and “beast” together than by accurate portrayal of racial types. More dangerously, the passage continues, “In the aftermath of that inextinguishable horror with which Europe viewed the raging of the blond Germanic beast for centuries . .. we may be quite justified in retaining our fear of the blond beast at the center of every noble race and remain on our guard: but who would not, a hundred times over, prefer to fear if he can admire at the same time, rather than not fear, but thereby permanently retain the disgusting spectacle of the failed, the stunted, the wasted away and the poisoned ... sickly, tired and exhausted people of whom today’s Europe is beginning to reek . . .”?° The second mention of the blond beast comes in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morality. Again, he is speculating on the formation of the earliest states on earth. “I used the word ‘state’; it is obvious who is meant by this-some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race, which, organized on a war footing, and with the power to organize, unscrupulously lays its dreadful paws on a populace which, though it might be vastly greater in number, is still shapeless and shifting. In this way, the ‘state’ began on earth.”?! This predatory horde of conquerors and masters had no sense of morality or responsibility. Guilt toward the subject population, together with responsibility and consideration for its subjects, was as meaningless to them as the idea of abiding by contracts. Unconsciously perhaps, Nietzsche’s description of the psychology of the early world ruled over by the lion-like blond beast goes back to the mythic world that Wagner portrays in the Ring cycle, and the morality and psychology of its gods and heroes. Wagner’s gods and heroes roamed their primeval forests exactly like Nietzsche’s blond beasts: disregarding law and contracts, raping and pillaging. Wagner's gods ruled without moral boundaries and without either social or individual conscience. But over the cycle of the four operas, Wagner demonstrates that even within their framework of pure selfinterest, his all-powerful menagerie of blond beasts discover the inescapability of the fact that actions lead to consequences, consequences to codes of law, and codes of law to punishment-though neither Wagner nor the gods and heroes in his Ring ever progressed so far as to abide by contracts, or develop much of a conscience. 

The third and final mention of the blond beast occurs in one of Nietzsche’s last books, Twilight of the Idols (1889). In a furious essay entitled “Improving Humanity,” he once again rages against priests and philosophers for preaching realities that do not exist. Their morality is anti-nature and their doctrines are merely instruments for taming and domesticating man the primitive, blond beast, whose civilizing is achieved at a staggering cost to himself. 

“To call the domestication of an animal an ‘improvement’ almost sounds like a joke to us. Anyone who knows what goes on in a zoo will have doubts whether beasts are ‘improved’ there. They become weak, they become less harmful, they are made ill through the use of pain, injury, hunger, and the depressive affect of fear-The same thing happens with domesticated people who have been ‘improved’ by priests. In the early Middle Ages, when the Church was basically a zoo, the choicest specimens of the ‘blond beast’ were hunted down everywhere,-people like the Teuton nobles were subjected to ‘improvement.’ But what did an ‘improved’ Teuton look like after being seduced into a cloister? He looked like a caricature of a human being, like a miscarriage: he had turned into a ‘sinner, he was stuck in a cage, locked up inside all sorts of horrible ideas . .. There he lay, sick, miserable, full of malice against himself, hating the drive for life, suspicious of everything that was still strong and happy. In short, a ‘Christian’... The church understood this: it has ruined people, it has weakened them,-but it claims to have ‘improved" them.” ?? 

These are the mentions of the blond beast in Nietzsche's own published writing. They are far from a call for the blond bease as representative of the German master race fueled by the will to power, to grind humanity beneath its jackboot. Hlowever, there is no doubt they contain ugly elements which could be developed further into incitements to racism and totalitarianism. It would be naive simply to ignore them as a starting point for the connective power of thought to spread infection. 

This was a point that was picked up at the time by the literary critic and editor of Der Bund, J. V. Widmann, who wrote a prescient review of Beyond Good and Evil headed “Nietzsche's Dangerous Book”: 

“The stocks of dynamite used in the building of the Gotthard Tunnel were marked by a black flag, indicating mortal danger. Exclusively in this sense do we speak of the new book by the philosopher Nietzsche as a dangerous book. This designation entails no trace of reproach against the author and his work, as that black flag likewise was not meant to reproach the explosives. Even less could we think of delivering the lonely thinker up to the crows of the lecture room and the rooks of the pulpit by pointing to the dangerousness of his book. Intellectual explosives, like the material sort, can serve very useful purposes; it is not necessary for them to be used for criminal ends. Only one does well to say clearly, where such explosive is stored, “There is dynamite here!’ Nietzsche is the first man to find a way out but it is such a terrifying way that one is really frightened . . .”

It was thrilling at last to be noticed as a powerful and dangerous thinker. Within the week, Nietzsche had copied out the review (a laborious process, given his eyes) and sent it to Malwida. This was the first review of his work for a long time and it mitigated the fact that the book had sold only 114 copies.