Cioran on Nietzsche

Still young, we launch ourselves into philosophy, searching not so much for a vision as for a stimulant; we track down ideas, diagnose the delirium which has produced them, dreaming of imitating and exaggerating it. Adolescence delights in the juggling act of altitudes; what it loves in a thinker is the acrobat; in Nietzsche, we loved Zarathustra, his poses, his mystical clown-show, a real farmer’s market of the peaks…

His idolatry of power derives not so much from an evolutionist snobbery as from an inner tension he has projected outward, from an intoxication which interprets becoming and accepts it. A false image of life and of history was the result. But we had to pass through such things, through the philosophical orgy, the cult of vitality. 

Those who refused to do so will never know the relapse, the antipodes and the grimaces of this cult; they will remain closed off from the sources of disappointment.

We had believed with Nietzsche in the perpetuity of trances; thanks to the maturity of our cynicism, we have ventured further than he. The notion of the superman now strikes us as no more than a lucubration; it used to seem as precise as a given of experience. Thus the enchanter of our youth fades. But which one of him — if he was several — still remains? It is the expert in failures, the psychologist, an aggressive psychologist, not merely an observer like the moralists. He scans with the eye of an enemy and makes enemies for himself. But he draws such enemies out of himself, like the vices he denounces. Does he attack the weak? He is merely being introspective; and when he attacks decadence, he is describing his condition. All his hatreds bear indirectly on himself. His weaknesses he proclaims and erects into an ideal; if he execrates himself, Christianity or socialism suffers for it. His diagnosis of nihilism is irrefutable: because he himself is a nihilist, and because he avows it. A pamphleteer in love with his adversaries, he could not have endured himself had he not done battle with himself, against himself — had he not placed his miseries elsewhere, in the others: on them he took revenge for what he was. Having practiced psychology as a hero, he proposed to the enthusiasts of the Inextricable a diversity of stalemates.

We measure his fecundity by the possibilities he affords us of continually repudiating him without exhausting him. A nomad mind, he is good at varying his disequilibriums. In all matters, he has championed the pro and the con: this is the procedure of those who give themselves up to speculation for lack of being able to write tragedies — to disperse themselves in many destinies. Nonetheless, by exhibiting his hysterias, Nietzsche has spared us the shame of ours; his miseries were salutary for us. He has opened the age of “complexes.”

from: All Gall Is Divided